John lies wounded and alone on the banks of the Escaut River after the Battle of Cambrai.

John recalls first meeting Helena at an inn after she accidentally disembarked one train stop too early.

John returns from the war to England, tormented by insomnia and unceasing pain from his injured leg.

John reopens his photography studio and hires Mr. Robert Stanley as an assistant despite the man having no references.

John develops a portrait and discovers a ghostly image of a middle-aged woman hovering beside the subject.

John writes to physicist Ernest Rutherford asking whether a camera can detect invisible states of being.

Mr. Stanley urges John to publicize the spirit photos and profit from families grieving their dead.

John confronts Mr. Stanley after discovering the man has secretly made his own key to the photo lab.

John finally tells Helena the full story of the spirit photos and the two are reconciled in renewed trust.

John discovers that Stanley has fled overnight, taking all plates and copies of the spirit photographs with him.

John leaves a jar of wildflowers for Helena in the kitchen and goes to the River Esk to drown himself.

Decades after John's death, Helena works in a London bookshop where the famous artist Graham Rhys notices her.

After a weekly phone call with her daughter Anna, Helena discovers she has absentmindedly sketched John's face on a notepad.

Mara returns safely from her latest overseas posting and reunites with her father Peter at his Suffolk home.

In Finland, Aimo follows his former lover Anna through the streets and she senses his presence without quite seeing him.

John's story begins on a World War I battlefield, where a severely wounded soldier clings to memories of his wife Helena as he waits alone for rescue. After the war, John reopens his photography studio in Yorkshire but struggles with trauma, grief, and the unceasing pain of his injuries. His life is transformed when ghostly images of dead relatives begin appearing in his portrait photographs, offering him a tantalizing glimpse of the afterlife and evidence of the soul's immortality. When he discovers that his scheming assistant faked the photos, John's hope is shattered so completely that he drowns himself in the River Esk. Decades later, his widow Helena finds a measure of healing through an encounter with a famous artist, and her act of unconsciously sketching John's face becomes a moment of profound release. The pool closes in 2025 when a young man named Aimo follows a lost love through the streets of Helsinki, his ghostly presence sensed but not quite seen, completing the novel's meditation on love and longing across the divide of death.

The core story of John, Helena, and the spirit photographs.

John notices that the young soldier lying wounded beside him on the riverbank is actually dead.

John recalls comforting his grieving mother after his father's death by lying down beside her.

During wartime leave, Helena suggests John desert the army so the two of them can hide in a cave together.

Many of John's veteran customers ask him to use angles and props to conceal their war injuries in portraits.

Two more ghostly figures appear in John's photo portraits after the first spirit image, deepening his confusion and hope.

John asks Stanley to photograph him, hoping his dead mother will appear as a spirit; she does not.

John's body is found sprawled against a weir, lying half out of the river.

Graham Rhys offers Helena a generous payment to pose nude, claiming nudity reveals a subject's hidden self.

Graham Rhys abruptly drops Helena as his model after her obvious artistic talent disgruntles and threatens him.

Mara tells Peter she has fallen in love with Alan, a journalist she met sheltering in bombed-out ruins overseas.

Anna's ghost returns to the family home in Suffolk and senses her daughter playing unseen in the backyard pool.

Peter tells Alan and his friends the story of returning a repaired hat to Helen James after her father's sudden death.

Sofia suffers a recurring nightmare in which Paavo is swept away by a turbulent sea after ignoring her warnings.

Eugène's widow recalls meeting him at a dinner party held to celebrate Marie Curie's achievement of her doctorate.

Helen James walks in Captain's Wood wearing her late father's repaired hat and feels his hand take hers at a bend in the path.

This pool gathers the quieter but vital moments that build the texture of Held's world, from John noticing a dead soldier beside him on the battlefield to Helena's bittersweet encounter with the artist Graham Rhys. The spirit photo subplot is deepened here as John futilely seeks a vision of his own dead mother and his body is later found half out of the river. In the 1980s storyline, Mara's love for Alan is introduced, while Anna's ghostly return to the family home in Suffolk offers the novel's most haunting vision of the dead seeking the living. Later threads widen the circle to include Sofia's terrifying recurring nightmare about Paavo's death at sea and Eugène's widow's tender account of the party where she first met her future husband. The pool closes with Helen James walking in the woods and feeling her late father's hand take hers, completing the novel's quiet argument that love endures beyond death.

Behind-the-scenes moments and the novel's supporting storylines.

Lying wounded on the riverbank, John meditates that faith flows from absence rather than from scientific proof.

At the front, John receives Helena's letter telling him his mother has been killed in a German Zeppelin bombing raid.

The young veteran tearfully identifies the ghostly woman hovering in John's portrait as his recently deceased mother.

Mr. Stanley hints that they could ensure more spirit photos occur, essentially proposing that they fake them outright.

John's suspicions crystallize when he learns Stanley has been secretly meeting the young veteran and accessing the photo lab.

In his final moments before drowning, John perceives a profound beauty in the look of longing on the faked spirit photo.

Helena undresses and poses nude for Graham Rhys, the first time in nearly thirty years she has done so for anyone.

Frustrated that he cannot read Helena, Graham Rhys hands her a paintbrush and lets her paint his portrait instead.

Despite being four months pregnant, Mara agrees to return overseas as an aid worker, devastating both Alan and Peter.

Alan tells Peter and his friends about his father's Alzheimer's and the man's miraculous moments of lucid recognition.

The doorbell rings and Mara stands there, having turned back from the airport and changed her mind about leaving.

Lia realizes from the photographer's long-exposure images that with enough time, even the dead might reappear in the light.

Sensing her late husband's permission to end her loneliness, Lia conceives a child with the photographer in the snowy woods.

The secret police rouse Paavo and his family from their beds at night and expel them from Soviet Estonia.

Marie Curie and Hertha Ayrton visit a pharmacy and find the young pharmacist Marcus treats the disgraced Marie with solicitous kindness.

Pool 3 traces the pivotal moments of revelation and decision that drive each character's arc forward. John's story builds from his wartime meditation on faith to the devastating discovery that his spirit photographs are fakes, and then to his transcendent dying epiphany that the longing in a false image can still radiate profound truth. Helena's transformation is marked by the bold act of posing nude for an artist and the reclaiming of her creative identity when she picks up a paintbrush for the first time in thirty years. The 1984 storyline reaches its emotional peak when Mara decides to return to danger while pregnant, and then miraculously comes back home, her return a living mirror of the ghostly visitations that haunt the novel. Later chapters capture Lia's snow-covered epiphany about long-exposure photography and death, leading to her conceiving a child who will carry her late husband's name forward. The pool ends with the unexpected kindness a young pharmacist named Marcus shows to the scandal-battered Marie Curie, one of many small, unwitnessed acts of grace that quietly shape the lives of future generations.