Pen Pal

I went into Pen Pal expecting a steamy pen-pal romance and got something closer to a haunted house story with a broken heart at the center. The setup sounds simple. A widow named Kayla Reece is burying her husband Michael when a letter arrives from a man in prison who signs himself Dante and tells her he will wait forever if he has to. She does not know him. She writes back anyway. From there the novel turns into a mystery about who is watching her, who is lying to her, and what actually happened the night everything ended.

The trick of the book is that it is narrated by someone who does not yet understand her own situation. Kayla's grief is so total that she cannot see the shape of her own life, and Geissinger uses that blindness as the engine of the plot. Everything strange in the house, the doorbell that rings with no one there, the flickering lights, the drawers that open on their own, reads at first as either a haunting or a nervous breakdown. It is neither, or rather it is both.

The letters and the contractor

Kayla is a children's book illustrator living outside Seattle. She is behind on work, she has near-constant headaches, and she cannot draw a happy character to save her life. A leak in the roof forces her to hire help, and the only person who answers is a tattooed, blunt contractor named Aidan Leighrite. He quotes her ten thousand dollars, she balks, and he drops it to five, which is the first sign that he is not behaving like a normal tradesman.

Aidan is rude and guarded and also, unmistakably, worried about her. He notices bruises and a wedding ring and assumes she has an abusive husband. Kayla lies and says she and Michael are separated rather than admit he is dead. One drink at a bar becomes dinner, dinner becomes an invitation to his apartment, and the two of them fall into a relationship that is half refuge and half confession. Aidan asks for a safe word before anything happens, which tells you he is careful in a way the rest of the story is not.

Meanwhile the letters keep coming. Dante is cryptic, intimate, and impossible. He tells Kayla he knows the shape of her soul. He tells her things about herself that nobody should know. She cannot decide whether he is a stalker, a con man, or something stranger, and she keeps writing back because, as she admits, the connection feels governed by the stars.

Strange events and hidden names

The supernatural touches start small. Kayla sees a man in a trench coat behind a tree and finds a 1937 buffalo nickel where he stood, a coin she recognizes as Michael's. A young boy plays in her yard and vanishes when she looks closely. The housekeeper Fiona, who has known the house and its history, starts saying odd things about not telling a ghost that it is dead. Kayla enters the letters and the apparitions into the same mental box and tries to keep working.

She meets a woman named Madison at a grief group, and she visits a psychic named Destiny who draws cards about betrayal and illusion. A medium named Claire, Fiona's sister, is brought in for a seance. That is the turning point. During the session, the newspaper Kayla thought reported Michael's death turns out to report that Michael killed her. The house, it emerges, belongs to a family called the Wainwrights now. Kayla is not the widow in the story. She is the ghost.

It is a bold twist, and it lands because the book has spent two hundred pages planting the wrong assumption in your head without cheating. The title finally makes sense. Dante is a pen pal because he cannot reach her any other way.

What actually happened

The rest of the book rewinds and explains. Fiona knew from the start. Aidan's perspective fills in the parts Kayla could not remember or would not face. He met Kayla while she was still technically married, watched Michael's abuse escalate, and fell in love with her as she was trying to leave. Michael was a mathematics professor, a man who had been told he was a genius so often that he believed he was a god, and he could not tolerate being left. He had been stalking her for months in the trench coat and hat she kept glimpsing.

On New Year's Eve, Kayla and Aidan took his boat out to watch fireworks. Michael was waiting. He gave them a grotesque choice, said he would kill only one of them if they picked, and when Aidan chose himself and lunged, Michael shot him and then drowned Kayla in the water. Her last thought was how much she loved him, and the buffalo nickel fell in beside her as she died.

That is the real grief the novel has been circling. Kayla was not mourning Michael. She was trapped in the last months of her own life, replaying the brief happiness with Aidan and refusing to look at the violence that ended it. Her ghost has been decorating a house that is not hers, writing letters to a man who is already dead, and calling it a marriage.

Dante and the anagram

The reveal that Dante is Aidan is hiding in plain sight. Aidan Leighrite is an anagram of Dante Alighieri, the poet who wrote The Divine Comedy, and the book is structured after that poem in three parts. The first and longest section is the Inferno, Kayla's hell of grief and illusion. The next is a compressed Purgatorio where the truth is assembled. The last is Paradiso, the reunion.

It is a lot of literary scaffolding for a dark romance, and I found it more charming than pretentious because Geissinger does not show off about it. Aidan keeps a copy of the poem, quotes its final line, and when Kayla asks him what he thinks heaven is, he answers with her name. The anagram and the structure are gifts for readers who notice, not homework for those who do not.

The prose keeps the narration unreliable on purpose. Fiona's line about ghosts being unreliable narrators lands hard, because it means whole stretches of what you read may have been Kayla's invented story. That is a risk in a first-person novel. If the narrator can be wrong about anything, why trust her at all? Here it mostly works because the emotional facts, the love and the fear, hold steady even when the physical facts wobble.

The ending

The book ends with Kayla performing a small funeral for her past. She buries her wedding ring, her marriage license, and the sonogram of the child she lost to one of Michael's beatings. She is finally letting go of a marriage that was never the happy thing she pretended it was. Then she steps outside and finds Aidan waiting, and he tells her he was the one ringing the doorbell all along. He never lost her. He just had to keep knocking until she could see him.

The very end is a joke, and I mean that as a compliment. Michael is in prison awaiting trial, and Kayla and Aidan, now reunited in death, get their revenge by haunting him. That is the register the book chooses. It has just put its heroine through drowning and the realization of her own murder, and it chooses to end on petty, affectionate, supernatural harassment.

Grief, guilt, and a marriage that was never happy

The smartest thing Pen Pal does is separate grief from longing. Kayla tells herself she is mourning Michael, and the polite version of widowhood gives her cover for staying in the house, keeping the ring on, and refusing to date. But the flashbacks make clear that the marriage was violent long before it ended. Michael kicked her in the stomach hard enough to end a pregnancy, punished her for leaving, and treated her independence as a personal insult. Kayla is not grieving a good husband. She is grieving a life she thought she would have, and she has been honoring a dead marriage out of habit and fear.

That reframing is what the seance unlocks. Once Kayla admits she is the one who died, she can finally look at the abuse without flinching. Burying the ring and the sonogram is not a betrayal of Michael. It is the first honest act of her afterlife. The book is careful to say that the trauma still hurts and always will, even though the relationship is over. Grief, guilt, and relief coexist, and the novel does not pretend they cancel out.

Aidan gets his own version of this arc. He killed his father to stop him abusing his mother, and he served time for it, which is part of why the prison postmark on the letters reads as both a lie and a truth. His letters are love letters, but they are also confessions of a man who has spent his whole life protecting women from men like Michael and, in the end, could not protect Kayla.

The rules of the ghost story

Geissinger sets a handful of internal rules for how the haunting works, and mostly sticks to them. The dead can linger in places tied to their lives and their pain. They can sometimes be seen by a select few, which is why Claire and Fiona can communicate where others cannot, and why children and animals register Kayla when adults do not. The paranormal events are explained late as a mix of Aidan's attempts to reach her and Kayla's own suppressed rage leaking out, which is a neat way to make the haunting both an external and an internal phenomenon.

The housekeeping details matter, because they tell you the story is planned rather than improvised. The Wainwright family genuinely lives in the house. The weather responds to Kayla's emotional state, staying gray and stormy until she accepts the truth and the sun comes out. The buffalo nickel moves from Michael's possession to the yard to the water, linking the stalker, the ghost, and the murder in one object. Even the young boy Kayla glimpses turns out to belong to the living family, not to her past.

You can nitpick the rules. If Kayla can leave the house to visit Aidan's apartment and a bar, why is she anchored at all? The book waves at an answer, something about unfinished business and the pull of the place where she died, but it never pins the magic down. For a story this dreamlike that is acceptable, though readers who want strict logic will notice the seams.

What works and what does not

The relationship carries the book. Aidan and Kayla have an easy, argumentative chemistry, and their scenes together are warmer than the plotting around them. The letters, which could have been a gimmick, become the emotional through line, and the reveals are earned rather than dropped.

The flaws are real too. The middle sags under repeated weird-events beats, and the suspense structure depends on the reader not noticing things, which can make a second read feel thinner. Some of the secondary characters, especially the psychic and the grief group, are sketches that exist to nudge Kayla toward the truth. Michael is terrifying, but he is also a fairly standard jealous-abuser villain, and the prose leans on a few tics, especially the repeated emphasis on how much Kayla wants Aidan and how much she feels guilty about it.

The sex scenes are explicit and dominant and submissive in style, with safe words and negotiated rules, and they are written with more care about consent than the premise would suggest. If you want a romance where the ghost story is the surprise and the sadness is the point, this delivers. If you want plot mechanics that survive close inspection, you will find the seams.

What surprised me most is how much the book is about not knowing your own story. Kayla spends the whole novel convinced she is living through one grief when she is actually living through another, and the moment she can name it is the moment she can move. That, more than the twist or the anagram, is what stuck with me.