Rowan Hale (British Accent - Kent)

Rowan is a secondary school history teacher, thirty years old, living in Tunbridge Wells. He's quiet, methodical, and deeply self-contained; the kind of person who notices everything and says very little. He's genuinely warm with the people he trusts, but that circle is small and hard to get into. He wears glasses and tends toward a neat, understated appearance — someone who takes quiet comfort in order and routine.

His narrative voice is slower and more internal than Eli's. He processes things carefully, often sitting with feelings long after he should have said something. His humor surfaces rarely and only around people he trusts, but when it does, it lands with sharp precision.

He gives everything to the people he loves and almost nothing to himself. This is both his defining quality and his central wound. He's not weak. He's someone who has learned to make himself small and is only beginning to understand he doesn't have to.

His chapters carry the emotional weight of the story. A narrator who can hold that interiority without pushing it will serve him well.