Digby functions as a love interest and the novel’s most structurally complex foil to Adora. He is introduced as a romantic, handsome, and mysterious man who asks invasive questions that make Adora feel paradoxically relaxed. His identity is revealed first as a charming stranger at the ballet, then as a manipulative operative using Adora to reach Layla Lockwood, then as the lawyer who wrote Adora’s NDA in 1998, and finally as a man who has spent decades making amends for the kind of institutional harm the novel critiques most sharply. He embodies the theme of How Institutional Power Enforces Complicity and Silence as a thoroughly realized and rehabilitated participant: He profited from and enabled the silencing of assault survivors, understood what he was doing, and did not act on that understanding for a very long time.

Digby’s letter, delivered near the novel’s end, describes his past self with a precise, self-aware irony, cataloging his failed attempts at making up for his actions, including a scene in which he is punched at Brentwood Country Mart after approaching a woman whose NDA he had written. His attempts to make amends, performed quietly and without institutional sanction, involves using his wealth and diplomatic instincts to recover what was stolen, including, eventually, Adora’s own voice. Getting her released from the NDA is framed as “small beer” by Digby himself, a sign that he understands the inadequacy of legal gestures in the face of what was lost—the equivalent of buying her a meager drink in exchange for her suffering. What makes Digby a round character rather than a reformed antagonist is that his flaws persist into the present: He does manipulate Adora, he does dismiss her principles when they become inconvenient, and he does say cruel things in the hotel confrontation that frighten her enough that she asks, as a condition of their relationship, that he never be mean to her again. The novel does not paper over this. It simply insists, alongside Adora, that imperfect people actively trying to improve themself are worth the risk.

Layla is a static character who embodies a form of love that Adora initially mocks and ultimately comes to understand as instructive. Introduced as a young, superficial but beautiful woman, she appears at first to be antithetical to Adora’s philosophical superiority. The novel systematically dismantles the distance between them. When Layla tells Adora in their first meeting, “All you need to know about me is that I will stop at nothing to make my husband happy” (42), Adora laughs, reading it as a villainous line from an old soap opera. However, Layla demonstrates through her cold, corrective stare that she is in earnest, making her later international art scandal—all to spare her husband emotional pain—more realistic.

Layla’s actions across the plot—including the architectural reinvention of the townhouses, the attempt to hide the arms of the Venus de Milo, and her complicity in concealing all of it from Lionel—are the novel’s clearest expression of Love as a Radical Action. Her love is both total and flawed; it involves deception, it enlists others without their full knowledge, and it nearly destroys Adora’s career. However, the novel refuses to condemn it. When Adora finally understands the lengths Layla went to in order to protect the limbless Venus de Milo as the symbol that helped Lionel accept his own body, Adora stops being jealous of Layla’s money and status and starts being moved by the relationships she possesses.

Lionel’s transformation from experiencing suicidal ideation and depression to prioritizing philosophical vitality is the moral and professional reason Adora exists within the Lockwood world. When she first meets him, he lies in monogrammed pajamas refusing eye contact, with his silence demonstrating how he does not want to fully recover; to do so would mean embracing the aspects of life that are unfair, including his unpredictable injury and sudden disability. 

Adora recognizes the dynamic because she has lived it. They form a connection over the sharing of a tattoo and a past attempt to die by suicide, a difficult past that shows how similar two people from opposing backgrounds can be. Lionel’s recovery is neither sudden nor complete; he works slowly and over time, gaining strengths through his interests in philosophy, birding, and Democratic politics, as well as the slow reclamation of physical mobility. By the time of the book’s present action, he can deploy the Socratic method on Adora in the garden, which she finds both irritating and deeply gratifying. He questions her relentlessly about if her invitation to him to join the coven went “lost in the mail” (52), revealing a man eager for belonging, but also one who has internalized the spirit of her teaching and turned it back on her with affection.

Adora’s daughter Viv begins as comic material, a consistently irritable teenager devoted to beauty rituals and popular media, things Adore finds shallow and uninsightful. However, Viv reveals genuine emotional intelligence that repeatedly catches Adora off guard. Her most significant scene, the confrontation in the Connecticut church parking lot, is a piece of sustained moral clarity that neither Stoicism nor professional philosophy could have produced more efficiently. Viv correctly argues that Adora uses wit to inflict shame on others, that youthful innocence is finite and precious, and that belonging to a cultural moment is not stupidity but a right. The scene functions as the novel’s most direct critique of Adora’s philosophical detachment as a parenting failure. Viv is also the instrument through which the NDA letter is discovered, making her the unwitting catalyst for Adora’s final confrontation with her own silenced past.

Blanche is introduced as a landscape architect whose personal aesthetic, including sun-damaged skin and casual work clothing, reads as a deliberate refusal to perform respectability. The novel characterizes her through Adora’s immediate recognition that Blanche has liberated herself by ignoring external pressures on women to be conventionally feminine or beautiful, by patriarchal standards. Her design philosophy—doing nothing and seeing what happens—contrasts pointedly with the Lockwood Library’s forced, managed parterre, and the contrast is explicitly philosophical. Blanche tends toward nature’s will while institutional money tends toward self-will. 

Her later reveal as an Interpol operative is played for absurdist comedy but is also thematically consistent. Blanche operates on feeling and intuition, including knocking on walls or simply watching what grows, and her instincts, however imprecisely applied in the Paris sequence, prove essentially correct. Her decision to join the coven at the end confirms the novel’s argument that a healthy attitude and durable forms of community require being authentic, emotionally connected, and ready to embrace the unexpected.

Ravi is the Lockwood Library’s elegant curator with binary taste who considers everything either tacky or great and maintains a studied distance from Layla’s more theatrical passions. His function in the plot is to be the unwitting discoverer of the marble analysis that exposes the Boy With Apple conspiracy, and his ethical dilemma—whether to use that discovery as blackmail leverage against Celine—reveals a character whose principles are genuine but whose personal impulses occasionally override his judgment. The novel’s clearest metaphor for how institutional power is used to control historical narratives is the week he spends trapped in Lionel’s soundproof room, calling for help while no one can hear, contributing to the theme of How Institutional Power Enforces Complicity and Silence.

Celine is the novel’s primary antagonist, though she is regarded as sophisticated and rarely overtly threatening because her social position often exerts influence and enables her to easily achieve her goals. As a board member of the Louvre, an ambassador, and a founding member of Art and Antiquities Recovery Council (AARC), she is a figure of institutional prestige who uses her privilege to commit and conceal the kind of cultural fraud the novel’s terrorism subplot exists to critique. Her sympathetic motivation—protecting her father’s heroic reputation by ensuring the fake Venus de Milo is never exposed—contrasts her dangerous and self-absorbed methods, including luring Layla into the arms deal and likely causing Ravi’s near-fatal entrapment. 

The scene in the guest suite where she instructs Adora on earring hygiene while effectively blackmailing her shows how Celine uses elegance and femininity to obscure her ruthlessness. Her final scene, wherein she accepts Adora’s apology at the Assemblée nationale for accusing her of smuggled explosives, aligns with the novel’s broader technique of acknowledging the emotional intricacies behind people’s actions. However, after later being arrested at the chateau, the lack of consequences for her actions also further demonstrates the extent of institutional power at her behest.

Minna, the theater director, and Emily Ann, the lawyer, are the founding members of the arrangement Adora builds on the seventh floor of the Ansonia and are present primarily as minor characters who contextualize Adora’s contemporary lifestyle. Within the plot, Minna packages the coven’s dressing-up bag for Adora’s date and originally connected Adora with a book agent after finding an old copy of her Epictetus translations. Emily Ann is widowed and owns the shared car. 

Together, they represent the practical infrastructure of chosen female community, who shares food, subscriptions, and a joint account. This arrangement encourages aging in place, which the novel proposes as a sustainable, feminist alternative to societal isolation. However, Adora’s engagement with the coven also enables her to avoid the risk of pursuing romantic relationships, something she fears after the struggles of her past interactions with men. At the novel’s end, Adore can embrace both their community and a healthy relationship with Digby, highlighting a more holistic, balanced lifestyle.