Stillwater

Ellis Wren

Retelling en 7037 words First published 2026 United States TalesReborn

A young nanny, Nora Hale, comes to Stillwater, a summer estate on a Hudson Valley lake, to care for two orphaned children whose uncle wants nothing to do with them. The house is quiet, and the children, Eliot and Fern, are beautiful, well-mannered, and strange. Then she starts to see the dead caretaker at the window and the drowned nanny by the water. The children refuse to see anything, and their silence is the point. By summer's end Nora must decide what the dead want with the living, what the children are protecting, and how much of what she sees is real. This is her letter, four months later, to the only person who was never there.

Adapted from Henry James's novel The Turn of the Screw (1898). Published by TalesReborn.

Stillwater

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