Emma Bloom and Abe Portman

Emma Bloom and Abe Portman are connected by a past romance that began before Abe left for the war and endured in a collection of letters and in a photograph Emma kept with her. Their relationship gives Jacob a personal link to his grandfather’s hidden history: what he had dismissed as fabricated stories and manipulated images becomes part of a record of real attachments and wartime loss.

A relationship preserved in photographs and letters

Abe’s childhood stories about extraordinary children had seemed to Jacob like inventions, and the old snapshots seemed to confirm that judgment when Jacob examined their visible tricks. Yet the photographs also had a history beyond the cigar box: Miss Peregrine had collected images from Abe’s past and later showed them to Jacob in the same house where she had shown them to Abe when he was young. That passage from one generation to the next makes the pictures more than isolated curiosities; they are pieces of a shared archive linking Abe, Emma, and the children’s home.

The relationship also survives in writing. In Emma’s bedroom, Jacob discovers a hatbox containing a hundred or more letters from Abe. Many date from the early 1940s, when Abe was in the army, and express his love in long, earnest terms. Their volume and preservation establish an intimate correspondence, though the letters are encountered only through Jacob’s hurried sampling rather than as a complete account of either person’s perspective.

The photograph before Abe’s departure

Near the end of the story, Emma produces a small photograph from a wallet tucked into her dress. It shows her with Abe when he was young, shortly before he left for the war. Emma’s attention in the image is directed toward Abe, while he appears preoccupied; Jacob reads the contrast as sad and beautiful, an image that encapsulates what little he knows of their relationship. The photograph offers evidence of their shared past, but it does not explain every feeling or circumstance behind it.

Emma says that she has always kept the picture, then decides she no longer needs to keep it in that way. She writes on its back and asks Jacob for his father’s name, Franklin, so that the image can serve as proof when the children leave the time loop. Its meaning therefore changes with its use: it is at once a personal keepsake, a trace of Emma and Abe’s history, and evidence that may help Jacob’s father recognize her.

Love, separation, and inherited memory

The photograph places the intimacy between Emma and Abe beside the separation imposed by war. Abe leaves for military service, and the surviving materials—the letters and Emma’s retained image—make distance visible without resolving the full course of their relationship. Jacob sees that the picture preserves affection, but also a difference in attention and an absence: the young Abe in the image belongs to a past that Jacob can reach only through records and other people’s memories.

That past also revises Jacob’s understanding of his grandfather. Abe’s stories were exaggerated versions of a childhood shaped by escape from persecution and by life among war orphans; the supposed magical children and enchanted refuge transformed realities too painful for a child to grasp. Emma’s correspondence and photograph help make that concealed history personal. They show that Abe’s connection to the children was not only a story handed down to Jacob, but a life shared with people who still remember him.

Narrative significance

The relationship is presented through fragments rather than a continuous romance narrative: a cache of letters, photographs passed between generations, and Emma’s brief explanation of when the picture was taken. Each item contributes different evidence. The letters demonstrate sustained correspondence and declarations of love; the snapshot fixes Emma and Abe together just before his departure; Emma’s decision to write on its reverse turns private memory toward Jacob’s family in the present.

The book’s photographs are described in its closing credit as authentic vintage found images, generally unaltered apart from limited postprocessing. Within the story, however, photographs can be misread as tricks, and their significance depends on who preserved them, who recognizes the people in them, and what history surrounds them. Emma and Abe’s picture thus becomes a compact counterpoint to Jacob’s earlier disbelief: an image can be both incomplete evidence and a meaningful link between a concealed past and its descendants.