Characters

She came home to bury the past — to stand at her mother's grave and make peace with her abandonment. A journalist by trade, she trusts questions and paperwork more than she trusts her own body, which multiple sclerosis has slowly turned into unfamiliar country. Perfectly flawed, fiercely resilient, and utterly alive, she is the lens through which every horror in Wicker Hill is felt.

Abigail's twin brother and best friend — the sarcastic, steadying warmth that cuts through the town's gloom. He follows her into the dark not out of belief but out of love, a skeptic who trusts his sister even when nothing about Wicker Hill makes sense. He is everything she is fighting to protect.

He came to Wicker Hill chasing answers, not nightmares. Procedural, rational, and stubborn, he becomes Abigail's reluctant protector — pulling her back from the water, standing between her and the town. He is the last voice of logic in a place that has no use for it.

Impossible elegance wrapped around something patient and cold. Sylvia never threatens — she guides, offering cryptic wisdom and feigned empathy while steering Abigail toward a “purpose” she claims to have already seen. A figure of corrupted faith whose cruelty wears the language of devotion, she is the novel's most unsettling creation.

Abigail's absence-shaped mother. The truth of her abandonment — sealed in a hidden letter — reframes a lifetime of resentment as the most terrible kind of love: a mother who gave up her children, and herself, to spare them a fate she could not stop.

A man who tried to tell Abigail the truth before it was too late. Wicker Hill does not forgive those who speak against it, and his fate is among the book's most harrowing.