Alma Peregrine—Abraham Portman

Miss Alma LeFay Peregrine and Abraham Portman are bound by a relationship that began when she found him as a displaced child and continued through years of letters, warnings, and concern. She regarded him with affection and protective urgency, but Abraham ultimately left the loop to make a life outside it. His death brings their correspondence back into view and reveals how differently they understood safety, concealment, and the possibility of an ordinary life.

A bond formed in displacement

During the years of upheaval leading up to the war, Miss Peregrine found Abraham at a camp for displaced persons on the mainland. She remembered him as a poor, tormented boy who was also strong, and said she knew at once that he belonged with them. Her account presents their connection as a form of guardianship: she recognized his need for refuge and welcomed him into the peculiar community.

That protection was shaped by the dangers around them. Abraham was Jewish, and Miss Peregrine later explained that he faced persecution both as a Jew under the Nazis and as a peculiar hunted by hollowgasts. The loop offered safety, but it also meant remaining hidden while people like him were in danger. The circumstances that brought them together therefore became a lasting source of tension between protection and the life Abraham wanted to lead.

Letters, warnings, and separation

Their correspondence kept the relationship alive after Abraham pursued a life beyond the loop. When Jacob brought Miss Peregrine the letter Abraham had sent her, she smoothed it over the arm of her chair and read it again. She recalled how urgently they had wanted news from him, and how she had once asked whether he meant to worry her to death by insisting on living in the open. Her affectionate complaint makes the letters more than a record of contact: they show that his absence remained a matter of active concern.

Miss Peregrine had warned Abraham not to leave, and his departure remained a point of sorrow after his death. Learning that Abraham was gone, she said she had feared this outcome and lamented that his grandson had to bring her the news. Her anger was directed at the loss and at the burden placed on Jacob, while her memory of Abraham remained tender: she called him stubborn, but the description carries the familiarity of someone who had pleaded with him before.

Abraham's choice and Miss Peregrine's understanding

After the war, Abraham returned from military service changed. Miss Peregrine described him as a warrior determined to build a life outside the loop, unwilling to continue hiding. Emma confirmed that she and the others had begged him not to go to America. Miss Peregrine explained that America then had relatively few hollowgasts and that some peculiars could pass as common there. Abraham's fondest wish was to live an ordinary life, a desire he often expressed in his letters.

Miss Peregrine believed that wish also explained why Abraham kept the truth from Jacob for so long: he wanted his grandson to have the ordinary existence he could not secure for himself. Yet Abraham could not wholly leave his peculiar identity behind. His particular ability and experience as a hunter of hollows made him valuable, and he was often called upon to help deal with dangerous pockets of them. His choice to leave the loop thus did not erase his ties to the peculiar world or to the people who had once sheltered him.

Death, memory, and the truth passed on

When Jacob first told Miss Peregrine of Abraham's death, he gave her the account accepted by the police: Abraham had been living alone, his mind had grown less sharp, and he had been in the woods at a time when starving animals were desperate. Jacob repeated the explanations he had received from his parents and Dr. Golan, presenting Abraham's loneliness and forgetfulness as reasons for his death. Miss Peregrine responded that Abraham had let himself grow old, a remark that reflects the distance between the explanation Jacob could offer and the life she remembered.

Later, Miss Peregrine confirmed that Abraham had known Jacob was peculiar, as stated in a letter. She could only imagine that he had kept this knowledge from Jacob to protect him from a life of trials and deprivation. The disclosure recasts Abraham's silence as a decision shaped by care, though it does not remove its cost: Jacob had not believed his grandfather's stories and now blamed himself for failing to trust him. He also admitted to the children that he had told Abraham's stories to a stranger and led Dr. Golan to them. In the aftermath, his apology to Miss Peregrine's community gives their inherited bond a new consequence: Abraham's history, once carried through letters and withheld stories, becomes part of Jacob's responsibility to those Abraham had known.