Ghosts

Ghosts are an unresolved possibility in the story, where the dead remain powerfully present in the lives of the living without ever being confirmed as supernatural beings. Dom’s imagined ghost gives shape to Henry Page’s jealousy and helplessness as he tries to love Grace Town while recognizing that her grief is still bound to Dominic Sawyer.

A Presence in Grace’s Life

Henry comes to accept Dom’s ghostly presence as a fact of dating Grace. In his view, she continues to dress like Dom, smell like him, and visit his grave. These observations describe Grace’s attachment to the dead, not proof that Dom’s spirit is physically present; the language of haunting makes Henry’s sense of being in a relationship with both the living and the dead legible.

The possibility of change appears when Grace tells Henry that she will stop visiting the graveyard, where she has gone almost every day. Henry is startled by her offer, which he understands as giving up a small piece of Dom. His immediate response exposes the strain beneath his acceptance: he wants Grace to spend less time with her dead boyfriend, even as he knows that Dom remains central to her mourning.

Henry’s Appeal at the Grave

Later, Henry sits cross-legged on Dom’s grave in the dark, picking at the grass and trying to remember why he came. He addresses Dom in anger, blaming him for leaving Grace alone and describing how broken she is. The outburst shifts into a plea: Henry admits that he wants to help Grace but cannot do so by becoming the person Dom was to her, and demands that Dom appear and explain himself.

The scene makes Henry’s appeal concrete rather than merely figurative. He waits for more than an hour in the darkness as his ribs shiver, but Ghost Dom never shows and Zombie Dom does not rise. The failure to receive an answer leaves supernatural existence unverified; the scene gives the reader Henry’s encounter with uncertainty, not evidence that a ghost has visited him.

Narrative Function and Limits

The ghost motif holds together two kinds of absence. Dom is dead and cannot answer Henry, while Grace’s continuing grief makes him feel present in their relationship. Henry’s jealousy is therefore directed at someone he cannot confront in ordinary life, and his plea at the grave reveals how inadequate he feels beside the person Grace lost.

After leaving, Henry walks home in the cold rather than driving. He decides that, like Grace, he can treat feeling pain as a sign that he is somehow doing something right. The scene does not resolve whether ghosts exist; instead, it shows how the idea of Dom’s ghost gives Henry a form in which to express anger, helplessness, and the wish for an answer that the dead cannot provide.