Removing a person by feeding DVR two almost identical photos?

Hi everyone,

I have two almost identical photos. There is the same person in each, in different places. I feel like this should be relatively straightforward: how do I 'combine' those two photos into one photo without the person (in either position)?

No matter what I do, I can't get Object Removal to do this properly. (Two photos into compound clip, mask the person in the two positions, keyframe them, run Object Removal*). It gives me a 95% perfect, beautiful image, then either stumbles on a wall segment, or leaves behind a sort of highlighted afterglow of one of the masks. So now I'm getting lost in the Fusion page, the clone tool, all of that. In over my head, to be honest.

While something tells me there should be simple way to just tell DVR to use this frame in this photo as reference for removing that object in that photo. Is there? Or any other solution?

Driving myself up the wall, thanks so much for any pointers!

*Default settings, more or less. Boundary, Analysis = 40, Search = 20, Linear, Internal. Any tweaking was just making it worse.