When Clara Ashton accepts a governess position at Thornfield Hall, she expects a difficult child and a gloomy house. She finds a brilliant girl, a locked west wing, and a master whose weariness hides a man desperate to be seen. The house has secrets. So does he. And Clara has never met a question she was willing to leave unasked.

When restorer Iris Calloway buys crumbling Blackmoor House, she discovers it comes with a resident: Edmund Blackmoor, the ghost who built it in 1874 and has spent forty years watching it decay. As she restores the house room by room, guided by his century-old knowledge, she finds herself falling for a man on the wrong side of mortality.