The machine in Elias's basement smells like hot copper and Mara's perfume. That's impossible. She's been dead nine months. He keys in the date: three years ago, the morning of the crash on Route 9. He has practiced this a thousand times. Stop the car. Stop the truck. The coil screams and white light swallows the room. When he opens his eyes, he's in the passenger seat of their old sedan, and Mara is alive, humming, hands on the wheel.

Elias grabs the wheel and yanks the car off Route 9 before the bridge. Mara slams the brakes, furious and scared. 'What is wrong with you?' The truck that should have hit them roars past in the rain, horn blaring. They're alive. Both of them. He's laughing and crying at once. She just stares at him like he's a stranger.

Back home, everything seems normal. Almost too normal. Mara cooks dinner and hums the same song. But that night Elias wakes to find her standing over the bed, perfectly still, her eyes open and black as oil. 'Thank you for bringing me back,' she says in a voice that isn't quite hers. The thing wearing his wife smiles.

Elias runs to the basement and powers up the machine to undo it all. The black-eyed Mara follows, calm and unhurried. 'You can send me back,' she says, 'but something always comes through with you. Something rode home on your grief.' He hits the switch anyway. The light takes him, and her smile is the last thing he sees before the basement, the town, and nine months of mourning all go white and gone.