Seek Immediate Shelter

A second-generation Chinese American PR professional who has spent his career at his father's firm, Li and Peters. David prides himself on his ability to spin narratives for clients and for himself. He is married to Daphne¹⁰ and has an infant son, Nathan. Beneath his competent professional exterior, he harbors an unexamined terror of his own inadequacy. When the missile alert forces him to act, he discovers that his self-image as a protector does not align with his instincts. His subsequent attempts to control the narrative of his cowardice (through his father's PR advice, through a planned Hawaii trip, through semantic arguments with his wife¹⁰) reveal a man who cannot tolerate the gap between who he wants to be and who he actually is. His arc explores whether genuine change is possible when someone's entire identity is built on image management.

Co-owner of Major Third music shop, wife to Dean⁸, mother to Cate¹⁶. Nina is the daughter of Chinese immigrants whose expectations she both resented and internalized. She experiences emotional volatility that she cannot control, describing her soul as a sky sometimes clear and pristine, sometimes stiflingly overcast. Her relationship with Cate¹⁶ has been defined by mutual misunderstanding: Nina expresses love through criticism and worry, which Cate¹⁶ interprets as rejection and bigotry. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, she keeps the illness secret from her daughter¹⁶, partly out of pride and partly out of fear that Cate¹⁶'s response will confirm her deepest fear that she is fundamentally unlovable. Her arc traces the belated discovery that courage means vulnerability, not stoicism.

A classically trained violinist with OCD-like tics that emerge as compulsive touching, head jerking, and obsessive fixations. His tics have alienated him from peers his entire life. His father (Pop) raised him after his mother's absence, providing unconditional love that Nick both depended on and took for granted. At the conservatory, his talent proves insufficient against institutional standards, and his loneliness becomes crushing. Bluegrass offers him a musical language where his differences become assets rather than liabilities. His relationship with Darin¹¹ is his first experience of being truly seen and valued, which makes Darin¹¹'s eventual betrayal devastating. After losing his band, his father, and his sense of purpose, he contemplates ending his life before the missile alert and a chance encounter redirect him.

A high school junior, soccer player, and clarinetist. The daughter of Dana and Tom Yen, Chinese immigrants who work at the nursing home and urgent care clinic respectively. Rachel chafes against her parents' overprotectiveness, their refusal to let her carpool with friends, their constant surveillance of her social life. She feels 'embarrassed but not ashamed' of her family, caught between gratitude for their sacrifices and resentment at the constraints those sacrifices impose. The missile alert forces her into a position of unwelcome knowledge when she pieces together that her mother terminated a pregnancy, likely to preserve resources for Rachel's future. This revelation transforms her understanding of what her parents have given up for her and complicates her adolescent rebellion with adult knowledge.

A recently retired PR executive whose husband Jacob dies of a heart attack triggered by the missile alert. Childless by choice, wealthy, and meticulously self-controlled, Clare has spent her life constructing an identity through career success and strategic decision-making. Her marriage to Jacob, which she believed was built on mutual understanding and his romantic notion of quantum entanglement, is revealed posthumously to have included a long-term affair and a secret child. This discovery forces her to reexamine not only her husband but her own choices, including her refusal to have children. Her relationship with her older sister Jorie¹², whom she has always viewed as reckless and irresponsible, becomes a crucible for examining what it means to adapt and evolve after the life you planned has vanished.

A contractor at the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency whose job involves processing weather alerts and running emergency drills. He loves hiking, solitude, and his sister Janice¹⁴. His relationship with Mick Luong¹⁵ has been moving toward domesticity (they recently moved in together) when he discovers Mick¹⁵'s casual online cruelty. This revelation, combined with family secrets his sister¹⁴ discloses about their late mother, destabilizes his sense of who he is and what he wants. Exhausted and distracted, he makes the catastrophic error of sending a real missile alert instead of a test message. His subsequent scapegoating by the agency and by the public forces him to confront whether his life's choices have been wrong and whether he has the courage to make different ones.

A textbook sales representative, husband to Ruthie¹⁹, father to young Miles. When Russell was six, his father abandoned the family without explanation, leaving his mother and grandmother to raise him. This wound has shaped his entire life, manifesting as obsessive questioning about why his father left, a complicated admiration for the man's decisiveness, and a fear that he might inherit the same capacity for desertion. The missile alert reactivates this old trauma, sending him into a spiral of drinking, emotional withdrawal, and near-infidelity. His attempts to track down his father or his father's other potential children lead him to his mother, who reveals a more complicated story than he imagined. His arc concerns whether understanding the past can ever bring genuine closure.

Nina²'s husband of several decades, Cate¹⁶'s father, co-owner of Major Third music shop. Dean is gentle, conflict-avoidant, and deeply kind, qualities that Nina² both loved and resented him for. He served as the 'good cop' in their parenting, which Nina² accused of undermining her relationship with Cate¹⁶. After Nina²'s death from cancer, he joins a grief support group where he meets Quinn¹³, a woman whose son is in prison for killing someone while drunk driving. Their relationship forces Dean to confront his unprocessed anger at Nina², his guilt over his failures as a father, and his fear of being a burden to his daughter¹⁶. His arc asks whether love late in life is possible when grief remains an active presence rather than a resolved chapter.

An orderly at Lark's Landing nursing home whose dreams of medical school dissolved into opioid addiction. His fiancée Milly left him on their wedding day, unable to commit. A nurse named Olive¹⁸ introduced him to stealing painkillers from deceased patients, and his use escalated until he was shortchanging living residents. His addiction has hollowed him out; he can remember being a person with feelings and ambitions but can no longer access that version of himself. The missile alert presents him with a stark choice: raid the medication closet one last time or help evacuate the vulnerable residents whose trust he has systematically violated. His choice in this moment becomes the novel's most concentrated test of whether people can change.

David¹'s wife and mother to infant Nathan. She was the one who woke David¹ during the alert and gathered emergency supplies while he fled. Her refusal to let David¹ control the narrative of his cowardice, her insistence on airing the truth at dinner with friends, and her naming of what happened ('coward') are acts of profound self-respect. She is not cruel but clear-eyed: she cannot unsee what she saw, and she will not pretend otherwise to protect her husband¹'s ego.

A mandolinist and banjo player who left the same conservatory years before Nick³. He finds Nick³ during a breakdown and offers him an alternative musical path through bluegrass. Charismatic and visionary, he speaks passionately about creating art that will outlast them. But his pattern of forming and dissolving musical partnerships, his gradual pivot toward commercial accessibility, and his ultimate disposal of Nick³ reveal a man for whom people are instrumental to an artistic project rather than ends in themselves.

Clare⁵'s older sister, a divorcée with grown children who have scattered, a retired government worker, a bird-watcher, a romance novel reader. She arrives at Clare⁵'s house after Jacob's death and provides cooking, company, and unsolicited advice. Behind her cheerful exterior, she is fleeing debt collectors and a lifetime of choices that never quite added up. Her relationship with Clare⁵ is defined by a dynamic from childhood: Jorie was the beautiful, effortless one; Clare⁵ was the disciplined, watchful one. The crisis of Jacob's death forces both sisters to see each other more clearly.

A former high school teacher whose son Alexander is serving a twelve-year sentence for killing a man while driving drunk. She has not spoken to her son in years, having stopped taking his calls from prison. She attends the grief group partly for her own pain and partly to escape the group leader who poaches members from a rival support group. Her relationship with Dean⁸ is complicated by her unprocessed guilt, her anger at herself for abandoning her son, and her ambivalence about whether she deserves happiness or love.

Chase⁶'s younger sister, a waitress at the Anchor restaurant with a beautiful singing voice. In high school, she became pregnant, gave the baby up for adoption, and has lived with quiet regret ever since. She hums constantly, as if keeping loneliness at bay. The missile alert throws her into Nick Chen³'s car, and her spontaneous humming during their escape becomes the catalyst for his decision to live. She and Nick³ form a musical partnership in Nashville, her voice finally finding the outlet it always deserved.

Chase⁶'s boyfriend who works part-time at Lark's Landing nursing home to get his mother higher on the resident waiting list. He is passionate about esports betting and video games. Chase⁶ discovers that Mick has written racist comments online telling strangers to kill themselves. Mick defends this as blowing off steam, not real malice. His inability to understand why this matters to Chase⁶, and his framing of Chase⁶'s reaction as unreasonable, exposes fundamental differences in how they understand harm and accountability.

Nina² and Dean⁸'s only child, a teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area who moved to California to chase a girlfriend. She experiences her mother²'s criticism as emotional abuse and has constructed a narrative of trauma around her childhood. Her adoption of a child with her partner Shana, and her gradual reconciliation with her parents, force her to reexamine whether her understanding of her mother² was complete. She struggles to balance her legitimate grievances with the recognition that her mother² loved her, however imperfectly.

An assistant manager at the Anchor restaurant who had an extended affair with Clare⁵'s husband Jacob, resulting in a son named Kevin. She is young, struggling financially, and genuinely remorseful about the affair. Her request for financial support after Jacob's death is both opportunistic and desperate. She represents the collateral damage of Clare⁵'s marriage, a living reminder that Jacob's betrayal was not abstract but embodied in real people who now need help.

A nurse at Lark's Landing who introduced Grant⁹ to opioids by offering him a pill from a deceased patient's supply. A single mother to her son Jesse, she is charismatic and lively with residents but carries her own addiction. Her relationship with Grant⁹ oscillates between enabling and attempted rescue. She represents the complexity of addiction: she genuinely cares for Grant⁹ and her son while also being the vector through which Grant⁹'s life unraveled.

Russell⁷'s wife who runs the Beckitt school district's music program and rents instruments from Major Third. The daughter of an alcoholic father who drank himself to death, she is vigilant about Russell⁷'s drinking. She is clear-eyed, practical, and unwilling to be collateral damage to Russell⁷'s unresolved trauma.

Leader of the grief support group at Beckitt Presbyterian Church who also runs a successful Mary Kay cosmetics unit. She scouts obituaries to recruit members before her rival Delilah Fister can, and may plant fake mourners in her own group. Her commercialization of grief is both absurd and oddly pragmatic.