Chapter 1

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DEDICATION

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The question was personal. What did it mean for her — Layla Shahidi, eighteen, headed to college, caught between the faith she'd been raised in and the skepticism she'd developed on her own — to call herself a Bahá'í?

Her grandmother, Maman Bozorg, had never doubted. She was a woman of absolute conviction — a former prisoner of conscience in Iran who had refused to recant her faith even when the Revolutionary Guard told her it would mean her freedom. She spent two years in Evin Prison and emerged with her faith not just intact but deepened, like a diamond compressed by pressure.

Layla admired this. She also couldn't understand it.

"How can you be so certain?" she'd asked once, at fifteen, during a visit.

Maman Bozorg had looked at her with those eyes — dark, deep, amused by a joke that only she could hear — and said, "I am not certain. I am faithful. These are different things."

"What's the difference?"

"Certainty is the end of questions. Faith is the courage to keep asking them."

Layla had written this down. She'd thought about it for three years. And now Maman Bozorg was gone, and the house was hers, and the roses needed pruning, and the question — her question — was still unanswered.

She moved into the house the week after graduation. Her parents thought she was crazy. Her friends thought she was dramatic. Her college orientation wasn't until September, and she had one summer to live in her grandmother's house and decide what she believed.

The house was full of books. Bahá'í books, mostly — the writings of Bahá'u'lláh, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi — but also poetry, philosophy, science, and a surprising number of mystery novels. Maman Bozorg had been a woman of eclectic taste.

On the kitchen table, propped against a vase of dried roses, was a letter. Layla's name in Maman Bozorg's handwriting — elegant Persian script that looked like art.

"My dearest Layla,

If you are reading this, I am gone and you are sitting in my kitchen, probably drinking tea, probably wondering why I left you a house instead of money.

The garden needs you. The neighbors need you. And you, my rose, need to bloom.

With all my love, Maman Bozorg

P.S. The rose bushes on the east wall are Damask roses from Isfahan. They are older than me. Treat them with respect."

Layla put down the letter and cried. Then she drank her tea. Then she went outside and looked at the Damask roses from Isfahan, which were indeed magnificent, and which looked at her with the quiet patience of living things that have survived everything.

"Okay, Maman Bozorg," she whispered. "I'll try."

THE END

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Crimson Ark Publishing creates fiction about the beautiful struggle of inheriting a faith and making it your own.