Angel Blush
Estaria's childhood love, daughter of a family the Valenses had quietly ruined.
Angel Blush grew up beside Estaria in Appledale, the two of them inseparable in the easy way of children who have never known anywhere else. What began as friendship became, in time, something they kept to themselves — meetings at a hidden cabin by Willow Lake, a private world apart from the town.
She was the daughter of Jeremiah Blush, a good man steadily and deliberately driven toward ruin by forces he could not see. Angel carried the warmth of a household under quiet siege, and a loyalty to her family that never wavered.
Hers is the loss that sets everything that follows in motion — the wound at the centre of Estaria’s story, and the reason he can never quite leave Appledale behind, however far he runs.