WARNING!

There are spoilers in some of the character descriptions. We suggest you read the book first to maintain the element of surprise. These descriptions are for historical purposes only.

Main Characters

Peter Brightly

Peter runs Curious Collectibles, an antique shop in Lambertville he’s kept alive for twelve years through nothing but stubbornness and a good eye. He’s forty-two, still has his hair, still fits his belt with one extra notch to show for it—a man doing reasonably well at pretending the last year hasn’t gutted him. His wife Susan left, took their twin sons Lucas and Jonathan to Doylestown, and replaced him within the year with a sporting-goods magnate who flies the boys to Aspen. Peter tells himself the divorce was amicable. He believes it most days.

He goes to an invitation-only estate sale outside Upper Black Eddy expecting nothing more than good inventory, and comes home with a walking stick carved from a single, impossibly twisted length of wood—one that doesn’t stay where he leaves it, and writing that rises to the surface of its grain like something remembering how to speak. What follows isn’t a haunting so much as an infection: scabbed hands, sudden nausea, and a string of very convenient deaths among the people who cross him, each one arriving right after he’s wished, however briefly, that it would. Peter spends the book trying to prove he isn’t capable of what the stick seems to want from him—and slowly, quietly, losing that argument.

Benjamin Delacorte (also Derick Rollins, also Michael Delacorte)

He greets Peter at the door of the estate sale as Derick Rollins of Red Oak Auction Services—navy suit, yellow tie, a smile as practiced and precise as his clothes. He’s the kind of man who memorizes small details about you and repeats them back so you feel flattered rather than studied, right up until he stops returning your calls and the company insists no one by that name has worked there in months. Later, as the reclusive Michael Delacorte, he tells a small-town doctor he’s the last of his line and receives sympathy for it. He isn’t lying, exactly. He’s just been the last of his line for a very long time.

He is, in fact, all three men, and none of them are a disguise so much as a change of coat. Born to Maren Delacorte, hanged from a tree in the woods above Upper Black Eddy when he was seven or eight years old and quietly ruled a suicide by a coroner who likely helped pull the rope, Benjamin has now lived a hundred and seventy-six years by the mercy of the same tree that killed his mother. He calls it the Devil’s Wood without a trace of irony. When Emeline asks what could possibly keep a man alive that long, his answer is simple, almost bored: the tree, of course. Everything he does—the sale, the stick, the small cruelties along the way—is in service of staying exactly what he already is.

Emeline Starkey

Emeline is smaller and younger than her LinkedIn photo suggests, dark blonde hair pulled back, a canvas bag over one shoulder that looks like it survived a decade of research trips. She meets Peter at a coffee shop in New Hope with the flat, unhurried confidence of someone used to being underestimated—when he jokes about not wanting her to go anywhere alone with him, she tells him it’s an open-carry state and lets him wonder if she means it. She’s spent months in the Bucks County Historical Society’s archives chasing a family that doesn’t appear in any census, a boy with no birth certificate and no death record, and a tree the local histories only ever mention in passing, as something people used to be frightened of.

What she doesn’t volunteer right away is why. Her partner of six years, Oliver Tillis, vanished from their kitchen two months earlier mid-conversation with someone only he could hear, leaving a half-finished coffee and one slipper behind. The police treated it as a man who’d gotten tired of his life. Emeline never did. She isn’t a paranormal investigator and bristles slightly at the word—she’s a historian who followed the evidence somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go, and she intends to follow it the rest of the way, whatever that costs her.

Oliver Tillis

Oliver exists in the book almost entirely in absence—in a cramped, leftward-leaning handwriting only Emeline can read, in an email thread with a Rutgers professor of pre-Roman tree cults, in a cereal bowl left on the table. A philologist by training, he had a gift for finding what nobody else knew to look for: pre-literate belief systems, dead languages, the kind of obscure colonial-era folk practice most historians consider a dead end. When he stumbled across an offhand 1923 reference to a community of “unusual religious character” near Upper Black Eddy, he didn’t let it go. Emeline describes the shift in him as obsession tipping into something else entirely—up-all-night, not-quite-hearing-her distraction, and finally the admission that someone was speaking to him. Two words, he told her: come closer.

He did. Two months before the novel opens, Oliver walked out of their house mid-morning and never came back—no note, no struggle, nothing missing but him. What he left behind is the reason Emeline finds Peter at all: pages of research connecting the same glyphs carved into Peter’s walking stick to a ritual language, and a scholarly correspondence that, examined closely enough, points straight at the man responsible for both his disappearance and everything happening to Peter now.

Supporting Cast

Timothy Cavel

Timothy is seventy-two, a retiree who took a part-time job at Curious Collectibles two years ago, a year after his wife Maureen died and left him with nothing to do but read apocalyptic news alerts on his phone. Peter hired him more as a kindness than a necessity and pays him under the table, and Timothy repays the favor by taking the job far more seriously than a part-time shop clerk strictly needs to—tracking packages, fretting over delayed flatware shipments, and treating every minor inconvenience as evidence of a larger conspiracy. He’s suspicious by nature, chatty to a fault, and reflexively certain that anything that goes wrong at the store is somehow Patsy Lolley’s doing.

He’s not built for the horror closing in around Peter, and he doesn’t know he’s part of it—he just senses that something’s wrong with his boss and worries out loud about it to anyone who’ll listen, which becomes its own quiet problem once people start dying. Underneath the fretting is a lonely old man who found somewhere to belong after losing his wife, and Peter, whatever else is falling apart around him, never has the heart to tell him to stop calling.

Patsy Lolley

Patsy has run Whispered Treasures, the antique shop next door to Peter’s, for eight years longer than he’s had his own, and their relationship has been openly adversarial since the day she walked in uninvited to inspect his empty storefront and pronounce it “such a shame.” Short, plump, blonde, and utterly without tact, she volunteers unsettling information as easily as insults—she’s the one who tells Peter and Susan that she personally found the previous shop owner dying of a stroke on the very spot where they’re standing—and treats other people’s business as fair territory for her own curiosity. Nobody, including Peter after twelve years as her neighbor, seems to know much about her beyond what’s on her shop’s About page; her brother Phillip works for her under circumstances nobody quite understands before he leaves town unexplained.

Patsy is the kind of person Peter has spent over a decade wishing gone—not dead, just gone—and when the walking stick begins answering wishes he didn’t mean to make out loud, she’s one of the first to pay for it, struck by a car and seriously injured not long after Karl Bauer’s death. She survives, which is almost worse: proof, if Peter needed any, that the stick is listening.

Susan Farrow

Susan is Peter’s ex-wife, a freelance graphic designer who kept her maiden name through twenty years of marriage as if she’d always suspected how it would end. She left with their twin sons for Doylestown and, within the year, a relationship with Andrew Dowling, a sporting-goods chain owner five years her junior who can offer the boys ski trips and Phillies games in a way Peter never quite found time for. She and Peter fought their way through six months of divorce proceedings before settling into something almost amicable—not because the hurt disappeared, but because neither of them wanted their sons growing up inside it.

Whatever bitterness lingers, it doesn’t stop her from showing up the moment Loretta calls to say Peter’s collapsed, sitting at his hospital bedside asking pointed questions about the spots on his hands and the weight he’s losing. She’s sharp, dry, and unsentimental in exactly the way that used to frustrate him and now, watching her manage a crisis with brisk efficiency, looks a lot like love that simply changed shape. When she meets Emeline at his bedside, her only real question is whether Peter has a friend now—asked lightly, but not quite lightly enough.

Lucas and Jonathan

Peter’s fourteen-year-old twins split their time between his condo on Union Street and Susan’s new life in Doylestown, and they carry the divorce the way most kids do—mostly fine, occasionally raw, quick to change the subject. Lucas was named for Peter’s father, Jonathan for Susan’s grandfather, and while they’re inseparable in the way twins tend to be, they’ve settled into slightly different roles: Lucas blunter and quicker to call things as he sees them, Jonathan a half-step more diplomatic, needling his brother back into line with a look when he pushes too far. Both talk with their mouths full, both have picked out a favorite waitress at the diner, and both have quietly figured out that their father looked up Andrew Dowling online more than once.

They’re also, without quite realizing it, the reason Peter keeps trying to be the version of himself worth coming home to—the one who remembers to bring the walking stick on a hike just to show it off, who asks careful, wounded questions about whether their mother is happy. When Lucas tells him, unprompted, that it’s okay that the divorce is hard on him because “there’s only one you,” it’s one of the only unguarded moments of tenderness in a book that’s otherwise closing in on Peter from every direction.

Karl Bauer

Karl is eighty-six, a fixture of the DelVal Hiking Club who shows up to every towpath walk with a pair of hiking poles that make him look, Peter thinks, like a cross-country skier stranded on flat ground. He’s sharp for his age and has lived in the area long enough to have some real memory of the region’s older, stranger history—when he spots Peter’s new walking stick on a hike, he’s the first person to ask, with real curiosity rather than politeness, “Delacorte, you say?” It’s a small moment, easy to miss, and it marks him as someone who might actually know something useful.

He doesn’t get the chance to share it. Days after promising to help Peter research the name, Karl is found dead at the bottom of his basement stairs by his housekeeper, and the official explanation—an old man, a bad fall—satisfies everyone in town except Peter, who’d left him a voicemail the day before and can’t shake the feeling that Karl’s death arrived at a suspiciously convenient moment. He becomes, quietly, the first real evidence Peter has that wishing someone out of his way is starting to work.