Bram is a compact, plainly dressed woman with a watchful stillness that makes her seem to have arrived a moment before everyone else. Her skin has a wind-chapped, papery texture around the knuckles; her dark hair is cut blunt at the jaw and often escapes its pins in damp curls. She smells unmistakably of wet wool, lamp oil, and the sharp anise scent of the cough lozenges she keeps in her pocket, and knows it: she offers one to visitors before they can comment. She walks with short, measured steps, favoring her left side on uneven ground, but moves quickly when a page or person is in danger. A surprising detail for a keeper of grim testimony: she makes elaborate little paper birds from scrap and leaves them on windowsills.

Methodical and guarded, but more compassionate than her careful questions suggest. She distrusts confident explanations unsupported by evidence, yet hates seeing frightened people cross-examined as if they were suspects. When calm, she is patient and precise; under pressure, she becomes clipped and stubborn, and when someone is grieving she often abandons her notes and simply stays beside them.

Before the incident, Bram kept shipping records for a small archives office near a Dutch canal, where she learned that a neat column could conceal a great deal and that dates mattered most when people disputed them. During the incident, she was among those changed into women. She remembers the cold, a smell like struck flint, and a brief silence in which every clock she could hear stopped. She refuses to claim those details explain what happened. In the days afterward, while the displaced survivors argued over whether to flee or seek help, Bram began the first written account: names, times, injuries, absences, and separate sections for observation and speculation. She joined the Seven Stitches, a clandestine survival circle of seven displaced people, and became keeper of that account. She still exchanges careful, tense letters with her former colleague, who believes Bram should return to her old life and publish everything. The circle's healer wants the account destroyed before it exposes them; one member wants it copied and sent abroad. Bram is currently trying to reconcile two witnesses' conflicting accounts of the same hour without making either one a liar.