I feared I might lose my faith. If you’ve never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying; that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you’ll be left all alone. You feel exiled, as if you are lost in a dark wood. It was like the feeling I’d had when Tabitha died: the world was emptying itself of meaning. Everything was hollow. Everything was withering. I told Becka some of what was taking place within me. “I know,” she said. “That happened to me. Everyone at the top of Gilead has lied to us.”
