Last Girl Ghosted

Wren Greenwood, a woman in her late twenties, lives alone in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone and secretly writes a massively popular anonymous advice column and podcast called Dear Birdie for the New York Chronicle. Few people know Wren is Dear Birdie, and fewer still know the truth behind her carefully constructed identity: Wren Greenwood is not her birth name, and her past holds violent secrets she has spent years burying.

At the urging of her best friend Jax, an influencer and podcaster, Wren joins the dating app Torch and matches with Adam Harper, a brooding man whose profile quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. They feel an immediate connection. Over three months, they see each other almost daily, though they never introduce each other to friends. Adam claims to own a cybersecurity firm called Blackbox. One night he asks Wren to share something she has never told anyone, and she reveals her darkest secret. The next day, Adam promises to ask her something important at dinner, then never arrives. His phone disconnects, his social media vanishes, and his Torch profile disappears.

A private investigator named Bailey Kirk appears at Wren's door with a photo of Adam. Bailey explains that this man, using the name Raife Mannes, dated a woman named Mia Thorpe before Mia disappeared nine months earlier. Mia's father hired Bailey's firm, Turner and Ives, to find her. Bailey reveals that Adam had only one match on Torch: Wren. He has also linked two other missing women to the same man under different aliases: Bonnie Cartwright, a survivor of a school shooting, and Melissa Farrow, who was orphaned after accidentally starting a fire that killed her parents. All four women share traumatic pasts and financial resources.

Wren pays Adam's outstanding debt at his vacation rental and collects a box he left behind. Among the items is a decades-old newspaper article about a police raid on a doomsday prepper compound, featuring a photo of Jones Cooper, the local police chief. The article shakes Wren because it is from her own history.

Interspersed flashback chapters reveal Wren's true past. She was born Robin Anne Carson. When she was ten, her father Luke, a military veteran with untreated PTSD, moved the family to his ancestral property, twenty isolated acres in a town called The Hollows. Luke embraced what he called "rewilding," an off-grid rejection of modern society that he believed was already collapsing. He homeschooled Robin and her older brother Jay, taught them to hunt, and stockpiled weapons in a concrete bunker. During the day, Luke could be patient and gentle. At night, especially when drinking, he beat Jay and their mother Alice. Robin coped by creating an imaginary friend, a brave girl she also called Robin, who nicknamed the protagonist Wren. Jay showed Robin a tree house and told her to hide there whenever their father turned violent.

Desperate to save her family, young Robin called 911 from a payphone and reported the weapons. Weeks passed. When police finally raided the property, Robin found her mother dead on the kitchen floor and her father holding a gun on Jay. She admitted she had called the police. Jay tackled Luke, and in the struggle Robin fired her crossbow, hitting her father in the back. Simultaneously, Luke's gun discharged and struck Jay in the chest. Jay died in Robin's arms. Luke chased Robin through the woods until she ran into Cooper, who arrested him. Two other families lived on the property: the Stones, who all died that night, and the Wilsons, who fled and disappeared.

Robin's name was mistakenly placed on the list of the dead. Cooper seized the opportunity to give the girl a new start, using the birth certificate of Emily Stone, a girl her age who actually died that night, and legally changing the name to Wren Greenwood. A woman named Miss Lovely took Wren into her group home, and Cooper's wife, Dr. Maggie Cooper, helped Wren heal. Wren created the Dear Birdie blog and built a successful life, burying her past entirely.

In the present, Wren and Bailey form an uneasy alliance. They visit Adam's supposed office and find Blackbox completely empty. Cryptic texts arrive, including the phrase "Welcome home, little bird" (186), words only Wren's father ever used. Wren drives to The Hollows and visits Cooper, now the retired police chief. Joy Martin, the local librarian, reveals that the newspaper article was torn from her archive about a year ago by a client interested in the Carson property. Adam's texts grow urgent, demanding Wren lose Bailey and providing directions to a meeting point.

Wren slips away and drives into the wilderness alone, disabling her phone. She reaches a fenced property where she finds a modern house with handwritten cards describing the life Adam envisions for them. She realizes this is where Mia, Bonnie, and Melissa all came willingly, lured by the same romantic promise of escape. Adam appears. Despite everything, Wren is drawn to him. She agrees to stay but plans to escape. When she tries to flee with a gun and the dead-bolt key from his pocket, he catches her and injects her with a sedative.

Wren endures captivity in an underground room. Adam alternates between tenderness and brutality. He eventually strangles her and places her in a body bag beside three makeshift graves. Wren regains consciousness inside the bag, fights her way out, and retrieves her gun from the house. Adam returns and reveals his identity: Adam Wilson, from the family that fled the property the night of the raid. His parents died afterward, his father in a bar fight, his mother of an overdose. He discovered Dear Birdie's identity through his cybersecurity expertise and used the column to identify vulnerable women who had written in for advice. He matched with them on Torch, lured them to this compound, and killed them when they refused to stay. He asks Wren to remain. She shoots him once in the heart.

During Wren's captivity, Bailey searches obsessively. He discovers that Adam has killed a local Realtor connected to the case, and Adam shoots Bailey in the shoulder before escaping. Cooper finds and patches Bailey up. When Adam's profile reappears on Torch, Bailey enlists a colleague to pose as bait, but Adam spots the trap and flees. Cooper arrives with a breakthrough from paper records: The man is Adam Wilson, and his company is registered to the property. Cooper, Bailey, and Jax drive through the night and find Wren alive beside the graves.

Months later, Wren is pregnant with Adam's child. Jax moves into the brownstone to help raise the baby and co-manage Dear Birdie. Bailey starts his own PI firm. Wren visits her father in a maximum-security prison for the first time, telling him everything. She says she loves him but cannot forgive him; he replies that love is enough. She decides to name her daughter Emily, after the girl whose identity she took, calling it "a rebirth" (378). Back at the brownstone, she and Bailey begin a cautious, hopeful relationship. Wren reflects that she is a survivor who will show her daughter the way forward from darkness into light.