2024 · This story is inspired by real people and real events. My cousin was influenced by a cult in the early 2000s, and was recruited and a part of their exodus to the forests in Costa Rica. It took nearly a decade to finally get him out of it and into rehab.
Believer
Giving up is not an option.
Maren has been counting the grey hairs at Judith’s left temple for eleven months. She braids them into the pattern every Tuesday and Thursday, folded so precisely into the weave that no one thinks to look. She runs the morning routine, the kitchen, the supply chain, the inner circle. She has made herself the person this community cannot function without. Nobody asked her to. Nobody has ever asked her to.
When a new member arrives and steps into every space Maren built for herself, Maren does what she has always done. She works harder. She teaches the newcomer. She gives away her own tools, her own routines, her own seat at the table. She has done this before, at other places, for other people who held her attention like a fist and then opened their hand.
This time she cannot leave.
A novella about what happens when the only person who accepts you decides to let you go.