Henry and Phoebe Reifsneider are an elderly couple in a rural farming town. Their grown children have long since moved away, and they rarely receive visitors. They live in peaceful, loving companionship save for a few minor quarrels, after which Phoebe jokes that she’ll leave Henry and he’ll never be able to find her. After Phoebe dies, Henry spends his days mechanically completing household tasks. At night, he grieves in silence. Weeks pass and Henry begins seeing a glowing, spectral Phoebe around the house. After each sighting, he becomes more convinced that she’s real. Suddenly, Phoebe disappears. Henry is sure that she’s not dead—she just finally left him like she’d always joked about. He walks into town and asks neighbors if they’ve seen her. Worried, they report Henry to the authorities, who decide not to confine a harmless, grieving old man to an asylum. Henry continues on his search, led by phantasmal glimpses of Phoebe: her laugh in the whistling wind, her hair in a drifting will-o’-the-wisp. Henry begins packing food on his days-long journeys. Soon, he’s not going home at all. After seven years, Henry has walked four counties away. All the locals know he’s passing through when they hear a gnarled but hearty voice calling out “Phoebe! Phoebe!” One day, Henry travels near the Red Cliff, a steep rock formation. Suddenly he sees Phoebe—she’s smiling, and she looks just as she did when they were young. He breaks into a run as the apparition weaves through the trees and toward the precipice. Finally, he catches up to her just as his feet leap off the ledge. When the townspeople find Henry’s contorted body in the valley, he has a smile on his face.