“Come on in.” Faith opened the door and turned on the light. She hadn’t been expecting company. Fortunately, she’d tidied up in the morning.
Eve looked around Faith’s living room. Her eyes fell on the old gray sofa. “This place is cozy.”
Faith raised an eyebrow. For Eve, this was probably slumming it.
“I mean it. It reminds me of where I lived in college. I think I had the same couch.” Eve sat down on it. “Come on. Sit. Let’s talk.”
Faith sat next to her. “I’m sorry about tonight.”
“No, I’m sorry. I should have noticed you were feeling off.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is,” Eve said. “You’re my submissive. You’re new to all this. When emotions are running high, it’s easy for things to go wrong. I need to be more vigilant. ”
“Still, it’s on me to be responsible for my feelings,” Faith said. “I guess I didn’t realize I was so upset. Or maybe I just didn’t want to admit I was upset.”
Eve crossed her legs and shifted to face Faith. “What’s been troubling you?”
“It’s my little sister. We send each other letters. Well, we used to. I haven’t heard from her for a while, and I just discovered why. She isn’t supposed to be talking to me. No one in my family is. But she got caught, so she’s stopped. She was my last connection to my family. Now I’m cut out from them entirely.”
“Oh, Faith,” Eve said. “I’m sorry.”
“After everything I’ve been through with my family, this shouldn’t upset me, but it does.”
“What happened with them?” Eve asked. “Your family. You told me you left them because they wanted you to be something you’re not?”
“Yeah. I mentioned that my family is religious. That’s kind of an understatement. On the surface, the religion they follow seems like any other normal religion. But my family, the community they’re part of, they take everything to extremes. There were all these rules and restrictions, most of them aimed at women. Men were the heads of everything. Women were expected to be nothing more than wives and mothers. There’s a reason I’m good with kids. I’m the oldest of seven, so I grew up looking after all my siblings and cousins.”
Faith folded her legs underneath herself on the couch. “The community, it was so insular. We were forbidden from associating with any nonbelievers on more than a superficial level. It was almost cult-like in that sense. And anyone who spoke out against the church? Or worse, anyone who left it? They were ostracized. Like my aunt Hannah. She left when I was nine. The way the adults all reacted to her leaving was so horrible. She just became this evil, toxic person to them. It was like she was less than human.”
Faith’s stomach knotted. Now Faith was that person to everyone in her family, even her sister. “I remember when Hannah disappeared. I asked my father what had happened to her. He grabbed my arms so hard and looked into my eyes with such raw hatred, and he told me never to ask about her again. N
ever to even speak her name again. It was the last time I ever brought it up. I had bruises on my arms for days.”
Faith found Eve’s hand on her arm. She’d been so lost in memory that she hadn’t noticed how tense she’d gotten. It was comforting.
“But I never forgot about her, that aunt,” Faith said. “And as I got older, I pieced together what happened to her, and I began to understand why she’d left. She was always a little eccentric. Different. That was why I liked her. I felt different too, growing up. No one else seemed to mind the constraints placed on them. Or if they did, they didn’t show it. All the other girls seemed perfectly happy to one day get married, have kids, and live out their days serving their husbands, never leaving the town we grew up in.
“But that wasn’t what I wanted for myself. I knew there was a whole world out there, beyond the confines of the cage that I lived in. I craved freedom. And things only got worse as I got older. My parents started talking about marrying me off as soon as I was old enough. They set up a meeting with one of our neighbors, a man who was ten years older than me, so we could start the courtship process. I was only sixteen.”
“Sixteen?” Eve’s face was marked with horror. “You were only a child. Your parents were going to force you to get married?”
“Not until I turned eighteen. And I don’t know if they actually would have forced me to marry him. It was more like they simply expected me to do as they told me. I wasn’t really a person, just property to be sold off, given away to a new owner like one of my family’s puppies.” Faith’s stomach churned at the thought. “But I didn’t want to get married. I was so confused about the idea. I had all these feelings, feelings I thought were wrong, for boys and for girls, and I didn’t understand them. How was I supposed to? That kind of thing wasn’t talked about. And we didn’t even have a TV. All I knew were things I’d heard from kids from school, but none of it made sense. I just knew deep down that I’d never be able to figure myself out while living under the thumb of my family. I knew I had to get out.
“It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. I had no money, nowhere to go. But I knew Hannah was out there somewhere. I started sneaking to the library to use the internet to track her down. It took a while, but I found her. We got in touch, and I told her about my situation. She was sympathetic, but I was a minor, so she couldn’t do much. So I decided to take matters into my own hands.” Faith’s fists tightened in her lap. “I scraped together money for a bus ticket to the town Hannah lived in, and one day, instead of going to school, I got on the bus and left. I didn’t leave a note in case my parents found it and tried to stop me. I planned to call them when I got to Hannah’s house but the bus was delayed, so by the time I got there my parents had reported me to the police as missing. There was this huge search, and it was a big mess. I called my parents in the end, let them know I was safe, and where I was. They came to get me. But when I told them why I ran away, why I didn’t want to go back with them, they just…”
Faith swallowed the lump in her throat.
“It was so stupid of me to think they’d react any way other than how they did,” she said. “But I was their daughter. I thought it would be different with me. I prayed that they wouldn’t be mad at me, but what happened was much worse. They didn’t get angry at me. They didn’t force me to go back with them or try to convince me to come home. They just left me there.” Her voice cracked. “They gave up on me. To them, I was beyond saving. I was tainted. I could see it in the way they looked at me. I begged them not to cut me out of their lives. I told them I wanted to stay a part of the family. It was naive, but I still loved them. They were all I’d ever known. But they refused. They cut me off. I was dead to them.”
“I can’t imagine how awful that must have been,” Eve said. “No one should ever have to go through that, especially as a teenager.”
“It was hard, but I was lucky enough to have Hannah to help me through everything,” Faith said. “I tried my best to move on, to start a new life. But I still missed my old life. My home. My family. That longing, it never really went away. Then one day, when I was in college, I got a message from my sister Abigail on social media. She’d made a profile just to find me and talk to me. She wanted to reconnect, but she didn’t have a computer she could use without anyone getting suspicious, so we decided to send letters instead. She was married by then, and stayed home while her husband worked, so she was the one who got the mail. She could easily hide my letters. We came up with an arrangement. Abigail would send me a letter at the end of the month, and I’d write back to her next month, and so on. Any more often than that would be too risky. We took all these precautions, but in the end, she got caught. And now, my only connection to my family is gone.”
Faith sighed. “I was the one who chose to leave. I should be happy that I’m free to live my life the way I want. And I am happy, most of the time. But sometimes, I miss that life. I miss my family. I shouldn’t want their love. They rejected me. Why do I still care about them?”
“Oh, Faith,” Eve said. “You’re only human. It’s not wrong to want all that. Love, family, a place to belong. And it’s not wrong to be disappointed when people let you down, especially when those people are family. You can’t be expected to stop caring about them despite everything.”