Poe and Me: The Great Escape

Angie has two things: a notebook full of unfinished stories and a fiancé who walked out on her. When the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe starts turning up at Jefferson Park, she doesn't send him away. Poe, who knows exactly what it costs to put the work second, becomes her friend and conscience. But Angie has a plan: move to Charlottesville, become a nurse, and prove she's someone worth staying for.

Poe comes with her to the university that broke him.

As Angie's nursing program tightens around her, Poe's own story unfolds beside hers: a young man cut off by his guardian and starved of support, who refused to give up the only work that was ever his. Thomas Jefferson, the university's founder, appears too, a charming, restless ghost who flirts his way through the afterlife and presses the same question from a different angle: what is the point of a life built to impress someone else?

As the clinical hours pile up, Angie has less time for her ghostly mentors and her own writing. The stories stop. The visits thin out. Angie works until she’s hollow, and the line between what she sees and what she imagines blurs after a freak encounter with her former fiancé.

On the edge of giving up the one thing that was ever hers, Angie remembers who she is, walks away from the life she built for someone else, and boards a flight to New York to write.