In the present, as Marin and Violet prepare the parlor for a second séance, Violet details their plan: They will first pretend to contact Marin’s deceased sister, Molly, to convince Ronan of the process’s legitimacy before they try to contact Elise Haines. 

Violet reveals the full extent of the ruse, explaining that Brad rigged the candles to extinguish simultaneously and hid a sachet of Elise’s perfume inside Ronan’s mattress. She also confirms that a camcorder is hidden in a mahogany box to record Ronan’s expected confession. However, Violet claims that previous strange occurrences, such as a picture frame falling and the noises in Marin’s cottage, weren’t part of their plan. 

Later, while alone in her cottage, Marin hears more scratching and a loud thumping sound. Unsettled and now believing that the island may genuinely be haunted, she returns to the parlor and uses an ice pick to carve a protective daisy wheel into the sideboard.

The séance begins with Marin, Violet, and Ronan at the parlor table while the hidden camcorder records them. As planned, Marin and Violet manually slide an overturned glass to the “YES” square, which startles Ronan and reinforces his belief in the event. They then attempt to move the glass toward the letter “M” so that the spirit can identify itself as Molly. The glass, however, begins to move seemingly on its own, resisting their control. To their alarm, it spells out the name “DAISY” four times. Violet complains of feeling a sudden chill and becomes ill, vomiting on the floor. Her body then goes rigid, and her head jerks up as if being pulled by invisible strings, suggesting that she has been possessed.

Speaking in a new, girlish voice, Violet introduces herself as Daisy Rue and claims to have no memory of who Violet is or how she arrived in the parlor. Attempting to expose the act, Marin reveals the entire revenge plot to Ronan, explaining that everything from Brad’s fabricated illness to the faked disappearances was designed to coerce his confession about Elise. Under pressure, Ronan admits to secretly recording sexual encounters with seven or eight women, including Elise, and sharing the tapes, but he denies any responsibility for Elise’s subsequent death by suicide. Immediately after, the possessed Violet grabs the ice pick from the sideboard and holds it to Ronan’s neck. Speaking as Daisy, she confesses that she knowingly murdered Katrina, Jonquil, Mrs. Minafer, and her own father.

Under the threat of the ice pick, Ronan gives a more detailed confession, admitting that he shared the video of Elise but still blames her for her later actions. Immediately after he finishes, Violet, still acting as Daisy, stabs him repeatedly in the stomach, killing him. Ronan collapses, and Violet snaps out of her trance, reacting with genuine shock and horror, claiming to have no memory of the murder. 

Marin and Violet then cover up the crime. They carry Ronan’s body outside and throw it off a cliff to stage an accident, meticulously clean the blood from the parlor, burn their stained dresses, and toss the camcorder (from which Marin has already removed the SD card) into the lake. Back in her cottage, Marin hears the distinct thumping sound again. She follows the vibrations to a loose floorboard in the center of the room, uncovering a hidden space beneath it.

Marin pries up the loose floorboards and discovers a human skeleton lying in the space beneath. From the long white hair still attached to the skull, she identifies the remains as those of Ruth Hume Semple. The skeleton is clutching a book. When Marin carefully takes it from the skeleton’s fingers, a folded piece of paper falls out, revealing a sketch of a young woman she recognizes as Daisy. Marin opens the book and, seeing the unfamiliar handwriting, realizes that she has found Ruth’s long-lost journal.

After reading Ruth’s journal, Marin learns the full truth about the 1926 tragedy. A young immigrant named Azra Kovacic, in response to severe abuse from her father, developed paranoid schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder. “Daisy” was a dominant alternate personality, while Katrina, Jonquil, and Mrs. Minafer were her hallucinations. 

Ruth’s “séances” were actually therapy sessions designed to help Azra integrate her personalities, which Daisy perceived as her friends being murdered. Because Ruth never chronicled their final encounter, Marin can only infer from Daisy’s own diary pages that Daisy killed Ruth to prevent her own psychological “erasure.” Marin now understands that only two women truly vanished: Ruth, whose body she found, and Azra, whose fate remains unknown. This leads Marin to the inescapable conclusion that since Daisy was never a real, independent person, she couldn’t have been a ghost who possessed Violet.

On the dock, Marin confronts Violet, who drops her act and admits that she faked the possession to create an opportunity to murder Ronan. Violet then reveals her motive: Elise Haines was her secret biological daughter, whom she had given up for adoption years earlier and had only recently reconnected with. 

To eliminate the evidence that proves that her story is a lie, Violet takes Ruth’s journal from Marin and throws it into the lake. However, Marin reveals that she secretly removed the SD card from the camcorder before it was destroyed. She points out that the video of Ronan’s murder clearly shows Violet. Marin herself is just out of the frame, exonerating her. When Violet asks what she wants, Marin says only, “I want […] to be known” (343).

Four years later, Marin is a successful actress and an Oscar nominee. The public believes that Ronan Peters’s death was an accidental fall from a cliff. The film Darkness was never produced; instead, Violet used her influence to secure Marin a breakout role alongside her in a tearjerker about a dying painter and her estranged daughter, which launched Marin’s career and earned Violet her third Oscar. 

Marin has continued researching New Avalon’s history and discovered a 1931 photograph of a woman named Zara McCutcheon who’s the spitting image of Daisy’s sketch. Because the woman in the photo wears a daisy pin, Marin believes that the dominant “Daisy” personality ultimately survived and escaped the island to build a new life. 

As the winner for Best Actress is about to be announced, Marin waits confidently, reflecting that she, like Daisy, forged a new identity and life for herself after the events on New Avalon.