Candace Harris, thirty-two and hollowed by grief, inherits her late husband Robert's secluded lakeside cottage in the Northwoods. Desperate for any thread of connection to him, she dusts off his beloved vinyl collection and plays the records nightly. On the third night, as the crackle of a rare jazz pressing fills the room, a man materializes beside the fireplace—tall, black-haired, devastatingly handsome, dressed in 1940s clothes. He calls himself Wraith and claims he's bound to the house, only able to take solid form when Robert's records spin.
What begins as wary conversations across the coffee table soon becomes breathless flirtation. Wraith is funny, cultured, and touch-starved after decades of half-existence. Candace, for the first time since the accident, feels alive. Their nights grow heated; he can taste wine on her lips, feel her pulse under his mouth, yet vanishes the instant the record ends.
But Wraith is lying about one crucial detail: he isn't a ghost. He's Robert's younger brother, Rowan Vale, cursed in 1948 by a jealous bandmate to remain trapped in the cottage's walls, visible and tangible only when the exact records he once produced are played. The curse feeds on longing; the more Candace loves him, the closer he comes to trading places with her—pulling her into the walls forever while he walks free.
As autumn deepens, Candace uncovers letters revealing Rowan's identity and the true terms of the curse. Torn between her dead husband's memory and the living man who sets her heart racing, she must decide whether love is worth becoming the new ghost of Lakehouse No. 9—or if she can break a seventy-year-old spell without losing them both.
