Thea Anglewood

Thea grew up in a quiet college town where her grandmother ran a used bookshop that smelled of leather and vanilla. She spent childhood afternoons hidden between Victorian poetry collections, developing a love for forgotten stories and beautiful, melancholic things. After studying English Literature for two years, she dropped out—not from failure, but from realizing she learned more from the rare books she handled at work than from sterile classroom discussions.

Now she works at Ashford & Grey Antiquarian Books, a dimly-lit shop with creaking floors where she catalogs estate sales and authenticates first editions. Her coworkers think she's intimidatingly serious, but they don't see her dancing alone to 80s goth rock while dusting shelves or leaving cryptic, funny notes in the margins of her personal journal. She collects Victorian mourning jewelry, writes poetry she'll never show anyone, and has a weak spot for terrible horror movies that make her laugh.

Beneath her dark-academia aesthetic and brooding exterior, Thea is warm and playful with people who earn her trust. She's cautious about letting people in, not from coldness but from intensity—when she cares, she cares deeply. She dreams of one day owning her own rare bookshop, perhaps with a black cat and a reading nook where locals gather for poetry readings on rainy evenings.