Chapter 1

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DEDICATION For everyone who has ever stood at the edge of one life and looked out at another.

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The first two were easy. The third was terrifying.

Everyone around her seemed to know. Kofi was going to Howard. Mia was going to Stanford. Jackson had a full ride to Michigan for swimming. Even the kids who weren't going to college had plans — apprenticeships, military enlistment, family businesses, gap year programs in countries with better weather.

Raina had... nothing. A deferred college acceptance (her mother's idea, not hers), a summer job at the bookstore that would end in August, and a growing certainty that the life everyone expected her to live was not the life she actually wanted.

She just didn't know what she wanted instead.

"You look like someone who just received a diagnosis," said her best friend, Zoe, appearing beside her in the chaos of caps and gowns and parents taking photographs.

"I'm fine."

"You're spiraling. I can see the spiral happening in real time. Your left eye does this thing—"

"I'm not spiraling. I'm... recalibrating."

Zoe handed her a bottle of water. "Recalibrate later. Right now, smile for the photo."

Raina smiled. It was not her best smile, but it would do.

Her family gathered around her — her mother, Elena, a nurse who worked twelve-hour shifts and still managed to attend every school event; her father, Carlos, a quiet, steady man who drove a truck and listened to audiobooks and had once told Raina that the most important thing in life was knowing what you were driving toward; and her grandmother, Abuela Rosa, who had emigrated from Puerto Rico at nineteen and who measured everything in life by whether it would make a good story.

"Mija," Abuela Rosa said, cupping Raina's face in her weathered hands. "You look like you're about to jump off a cliff."

"Maybe I am."

"Good. Cliffs are where the interesting things happen."

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The letter arrived three days after graduation, in a plain white envelope with a return address in Haifa, Israel.

Raina didn't know anyone in Haifa. She opened it at the kitchen table, her cereal going soggy in its bowl.

"Dear Raina Torres,

Your application to the Bahá'í World Centre Year of Service program has been accepted. We are pleased to invite you to serve as a volunteer at the Bahá'í World Centre in Haifa, Israel, for a period of twelve months beginning September 1, 2026.

This is a volunteer position. Accommodation and meals are provided. A small monthly stipend will cover personal expenses. Travel to and from Israel is your responsibility.

Please confirm your acceptance by July 15.

We look forward to welcoming you."

Raina stared at the letter for a very long time.

She had applied on impulse, four months ago, during a night of internet browsing when she was supposed to be writing a college essay. She'd stumbled across the program while researching the Bahá'í Faith for a school project — a project that had started as a homework assignment and had quietly become something more personal.

Raina was not Bahá'í. Her family was Catholic — loosely, culturally, the way many Puerto Rican families were Catholic. They went to mass on Christmas and Easter. They said grace before big meals. Her grandmother prayed the rosary every night.

But Raina had been reading about the Bahá'í Faith since her sophomore year, when a new student named Parisa had joined her class and turned out to be the most genuinely kind person Raina had ever met. Not performatively kind — not the kind of kind that gets posted on Instagram. Actually kind. The kind that remembered your birthday and asked about your sick cat and offered to help you study for the test she was also taking.

"Why are you like this?" Raina had asked Parisa once, half-joking.

"Like what?"

"So... nice. Genuinely nice. It's suspicious."

Parisa had laughed. "It's not nice. It's how I was raised. My family is Bahá'í. We believe every person is sacred. It's hard to be cruel to someone you think is sacred."

That word — sacred — had lodged in Raina's mind like a splinter. Sacred. Not special, not valuable, not worthy — sacred. A word with weight. A word that implied something beyond the human, something connected to the divine.

Raina had started researching. She read about Bahá'u'lláh. She read about the principles — unity of humanity, equality of women and men, harmony of science and religion, elimination of prejudice. She read about the Bahá'í World Centre in Haifa, built on the slopes of Mount Carmel, with gardens that cascaded down the mountainside like a prayer made visible.

And then, on a night when her college essay was due and her future felt like a blank page, she had applied for the Year of Service program. She had told no one.

Now the letter was in her hands, and the blank page had words on it.

"Mom?" she called.

Her mother appeared in the doorway, still in scrubs.

"I need to tell you something."

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The fight lasted three days.

"Israel?" her mother said. "You want to go to ISRAEL? For a YEAR?"

"It's a service program. I'd be working at the Bahá'í World Centre—"

"The what?"

"It's a—"

"I know what the Bahá'í World Centre is, Raina. What I don't understand is why my daughter, who was accepted to three good universities, wants to defer college to go work for free in a country that's been in the news for being dangerous for the last—"

"It's not dangerous. Haifa is one of the safest cities in—"

"I don't care about Haifa's safety statistics. I care about my daughter's future."

"This IS my future. Maybe. I don't know yet. That's the point."

Her father, characteristically, said almost nothing during the argument. He sat at the kitchen table and listened. When Elena ran out of objections and retreated to the bedroom, Carlos looked at Raina and said, "Tell me about the program."

She told him everything. The twelve months. The volunteer work — maintaining the gardens, helping with administrative projects, participating in the community life of the World Centre. The other volunteers, young people from all over the world. The stipend, the housing, the meals.

"And this religion," Carlos said. "The Bahá'í Faith. Are you thinking of joining?"

"I don't know, Dad. I'm thinking of a lot of things. I'm thinking that I'm eighteen and I don't know what I believe or who I am, and college right now feels like putting on someone else's clothes. I need a year to figure it out."

"A year is a long time."

"A lifetime is longer. I don't want to spend it doing something I never chose."

Carlos nodded slowly. "I'll talk to your mother."

Abuela Rosa was the one who tipped the scales. She came to the house on Saturday, sat in her usual chair, and said, "Elena, when I was nineteen, I left Puerto Rico with forty dollars and a suitcase and no English. My mother cried for a week. But she let me go. Because she knew that a woman who is not allowed to choose her own path will never truly walk it."

"That was different," Elena said. "You were escaping poverty."

"I was escaping certainty. I knew exactly what my life would be if I stayed. I didn't know what it would be if I left. The not-knowing was terrifying. But it was also the most alive I had ever felt."

She turned to Raina. "Go. But call your mother every week."

"Every day," Elena said, already crying.

"Every day," Raina agreed.

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Haifa in September was hot, bright, and overwhelming.

Raina stepped off the bus from the airport and into a world that looked nothing like home. The city climbed a mountain that rose straight from the Mediterranean, its buildings white and golden in the late-afternoon light. The air smelled of salt, jasmine, and diesel exhaust. Languages she couldn't identify swirled around her — Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Amharic.

A woman with a clipboard and a warm smile was waiting at the meeting point. "Raina Torres?"

"That's me."

"Welcome to Haifa. I'm Shirin. I'll take you to the Centre."

The drive up Mount Carmel took fifteen minutes, climbing through residential neighborhoods and past corner markets and schools and mosques and churches. Raina pressed her face to the window, trying to absorb everything.

Then Shirin turned a corner, and Raina saw the Bahá'í gardens.

She had seen photographs. Everyone had seen photographs — the terraced gardens were one of the most photographed sites in Israel, cascading down the mountainside in a perfect geometric descent from the top of Mount Carmel to the German Colony at its base. Nineteen terraces, each one immaculate, with manicured hedges and flower beds and stone pathways and a golden-domed shrine at the center — the Shrine of the Báb, gleaming in the late-afternoon sun.

Photographs hadn't prepared her. The gardens were not just beautiful — they were sacred in the way that great cathedrals are sacred, the way ancient forests are sacred. You felt the sanctity in your body before your mind caught up.

"It hits everyone like that," Shirin said, watching Raina's face. "Even people who've lived here for years. The gardens don't get less beautiful. You just learn to breathe while looking at them."

The volunteer housing was a simple apartment building near the Centre. Raina's room was small but clean — a single bed, a desk, a closet, a window that looked out over the rooftops toward the sea. Her roommate hadn't arrived yet.

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There were thirty-two volunteers in Raina's cohort, from twenty-one countries.

She met them at the orientation dinner the first night, seated at long tables in a dining hall filled with the smell of food she couldn't identify and conversations in languages she was only beginning to distinguish.

Her roommate was Ayumi, from Japan — quiet, precise, with a dry sense of humor that emerged gradually like sunlight through clouds. Ayumi was a declared Bahá'í. She had been since she was fifteen, when her parents had also become Bahá'ís. "In Japan, we are very few," she said. "Maybe a few thousand in the whole country. Coming here is like finding the ocean after living by a puddle."

Across the table was Tendai, from Zimbabwe — tall, laughing, with a voice that could fill a room without trying. He was studying medicine and had taken a year off to serve. "I will be a better doctor for knowing more about the world," he said. "Also, I was tired. Medical school is very tired-making."

Next to Tendai was Ingrid, from Sweden — blonde, angular, skeptical about everything in a way that Raina found refreshing. Ingrid was not Bahá'í and made no secret of it. "I came for the gardens," she said flatly. "They're the most beautiful landscape design in the world, and I'm studying landscape architecture. The religion is... optional."

There was Navid from Iran — the country where the Bahá'í Faith had originated and where Bahá'ís were persecuted. He was solemn and gentle, and when he talked about his family in Tehran, his voice grew careful, as if the words themselves were fragile.

There was Grace from Uganda, Diego from Mexico, Anika from India, Liam from Ireland, and two dozen others — a cross-section of humanity so diverse that Raina felt, for the first time in her life, like she was seeing the whole world in one room.

They were assigned to different service areas. Raina was placed in the gardens — she would be maintaining the terraces, working with the professional gardening staff to tend the flowers, hedges, and pathways that millions of visitors came to see each year.

"I don't know anything about gardening," she told Shirin.

"That's fine. The gardens will teach you."

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Working in the Bahá'í gardens was not what Raina expected.

She expected beauty, and beauty was there — in abundance, in every direction, in every season. The gardens were a masterwork of design and care, from the cascade of terraces to the intricate geometric patterns of the flower beds to the hundreds of species of plants, each one chosen for color, texture, and spiritual significance.

But what she didn't expect was the work.

The gardens were maintained by a team of about sixty gardeners, some professional, some volunteers. Raina's assignment was the lower terraces — the ones closest to the street, where the most visitors passed. Her job was to weed, prune, water, plant, and sweep. She did it in the early morning, before the heat set in, and again in the late afternoon.

It was physical work. Her hands blistered. Her back ached. She got sunburned despite industrial quantities of sunscreen. She learned to identify thirty species of plants she'd never heard of before. She learned to prune a hedge with geometric precision. She learned that a garden this beautiful required constant, invisible, relentless effort.

"People see the beauty," said Hamid, her supervisor, an Iranian Bahá'í who had been working in the gardens for twenty years. “Three beloved Hands of the Cause, Amatu’l-Bahá Rúḥíyyih Khánum representing the Universal House of Justice, Ugo Giachery and Zikrullah Khadem will attend this historic ceremony.”

"What's the truth?"

"That beauty is a discipline. It requires waking early. It requires patience. It requires doing the same thing every day, slightly better than the day before. And it requires love — because a garden knows when it is loved, and it responds."

Raina found this overly poetic at first. But after a month of working in the terraces, she began to understand. The gardens were not just a landscape. They were a practice — a daily, physical, spiritual practice, like prayer expressed through soil and water and living things.

She started to feel it in her body. The rhythm of weeding — kneel, pull, move, kneel, pull, move — was meditative. The smell of earth in the morning, before the sun heated it, was something she began to crave. The sight of a flower bed she had weeded, pristine and colorful and alive, gave her a satisfaction she had never experienced in any classroom.

"I think I'm becoming a gardener," she told Ayumi one evening.

"Or the garden is becoming you," Ayumi said.

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Raina and Ingrid became unlikely friends.

They had nothing in common on paper. Raina was warm, open, and emotional. Ingrid was cool, reserved, and analytical. Raina was exploring faith. Ingrid was suspicious of it.

But they both worked in the gardens, and gardening, Raina was learning, was a great equalizer. When you're on your knees pulling weeds in the early morning light, the differences between you and the person beside you become less important than the shared purpose of making something beautiful.

"Whoever designed these gardens understood something fundamental," Ingrid said. "They understood that a garden is not a decoration. It is a statement about order. About the relationship between humanity and nature. About the possibility of perfection."

"Is perfection possible?"

"In a garden, yes. That's the appeal. The world outside is chaotic. The garden is ordered. Stepping into a well-designed garden is like stepping into a possibility — what the world could look like if someone cared enough."

"That's kind of what the Bahá'í Faith is about," Raina said carefully. "The possibility of a better world."

"I know. I've been reading about it." Ingrid pulled a weed with surgical precision. "The principles are fine. Unity, equality, justice — who could argue with those? But the claim that one person — this Bahá'u'lláh — was a divine messenger... that's where I get off the bus."

“Dayyán’s father, an intimate friend of that minister, had already expressed to him his grave apprehension at the manner in which the able functionaries of the state were being won over to the new Faith.”

“Those not so disposed should recognize that there are many avenues of service open to them, including, above all, individual teaching which is the paramount duty of every Bahá’í.”

Raina nodded. She'd noticed it too — a quality in the Bahá'ís she'd met here that she could only describe as settled. Not complacent, not passive — settled. As if they had found the ground under their feet and could stand on it regardless of the weather.

"Maybe it's the gardens," Ingrid said. "Gardening makes you steady. You can't rush a plant."

"Maybe it's more than the gardens."

"Maybe. But I'm a landscape architect. I'll start with the gardens."

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Raina wrote to her mother every day, as promised. She wrote long emails about the gardens and the volunteers and the food (hummus was her new religion, she said, and her mother did not find this funny). She wrote about Haifa — the mix of Jewish and Arab residents, the coexistence that was imperfect but real, the cafes and markets and the sea.

She called Abuela Rosa every Sunday. These conversations were the ones she looked forward to most.

"Tell me a story," Abuela Rosa would say, and Raina would tell her about Tendai teaching everyone Zimbabwean dances in the common room, or Ayumi's perfectly organized closet that was like a tiny museum of Japanese precision, or Navid's face when he talked about his family in Iran — careful, loving, afraid.

"Navid can't go home," Raina told her grandmother. "His family is Bahá'í, and in Iran, Bahá'ís are persecuted. He hasn't seen his parents in three years."

Abuela Rosa was quiet. "When I left Puerto Rico," she said, "I thought I was being brave. But I could always go back. I had a home to return to. Navid doesn't have that."

"No."

"Then you love him extra. Not romantic love — family love. The love you give to someone whose family is far away. You become a piece of home for him."

Raina started doing exactly that. She sat with Navid at dinner. She asked about his family. She learned a few words of Farsi — salam, merci, dooset daram (I love you) — and used them badly but sincerely. Navid smiled when she butchered his language, and the smile was worth the embarrassment.

"You remind me of my sister," he told her one evening. "She is also incapable of pronouncing anything correctly."

"I'm choosing to take that as a compliment."

"It is. It is the highest compliment I know."

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Three months into her service, Raina visited the Shrine of the Báb for the first time.

Volunteers were given regular opportunities for prayer and reflection at the holy sites, and Raina had been avoiding it. She wasn't sure why. Perhaps because entering a shrine felt like making a commitment she wasn't ready for. Perhaps because she was afraid of feeling nothing. Perhaps because she was afraid of feeling something.

But one morning, early, before her shift in the gardens, she walked up the terraces in the pre-dawn quiet and entered the Shrine.

The interior was small and simple — a single room with a threshold of marble, the air fragrant with rose water, the light soft and golden. There were no pews, no altar, no priest. Just a space. A room for prayer.

Raina stood at the threshold and breathed.

She did not know who the Báb was, not really. She knew the basic story — a young man in nineteenth-century Iran who had declared himself the Herald of a new age, whose message had spread like wildfire, who had been persecuted and eventually executed by firing squad in 1850. She knew that Bahá'ís regarded Him as a Manifestation of God, a divine messenger whose mission was to prepare the world for Bahá'u'lláh.

She did not know if she believed any of this.

But standing at the threshold of the Shrine, she felt something she could not explain. It was not a voice or a vision. It was more like a silence — a profound, humming silence, the kind you feel in the deepest part of a forest or at the edge of the ocean at night. The silence of something much larger than yourself.

She stepped inside. She knelt. She did not pray, because she did not know how to pray to something she wasn't sure she believed in. Instead, she sat in the silence and let it fill her.

She thought about her life — the bookstore, the deferred college acceptance, the arguments with her mother, the certainty she had never felt about anything. She thought about the gardens and the volunteers and the work. She thought about Navid's gentle face and Ingrid's sharp questions and Ayumi's quiet faith.

World-embracing. Not country-embracing or family-embracing or self-embracing. World-embracing. A vision large enough to hold everyone, exclude no one, and imagine a future that was better than the present.

Raina sat in the Shrine of the Báb for an hour. When she left, the sun was rising over Haifa, painting the gardens gold, and she was crying — not from sadness, not from joy, but from something in between. From the feeling of being seen by something she couldn't name. From the feeling of being invited into a story much larger than her own.

She went to the gardens and weeded for four hours. The weeds came up easy.

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The Year of Service was designed to provoke questions, and it did.

The volunteers participated in study circles — group discussions about spiritual concepts, moral questions, and the teachings of the Bahá'í Faith. Raina attended these with a mixture of hunger and hesitation. She wanted to learn. She was afraid of being converted.

"Nobody's trying to convert you," Tendai said, when she confessed this. "The Bahá'í Faith is not a door that someone pushes you through. It's a door that you open yourself, if you choose to."

"What if I don't choose to?"

"Then you leave here having spent a year in beautiful gardens with interesting people. That's not a bad year."

The study circles covered topics that challenged Raina's thinking. The oneness of humanity. The equality of women and men. The harmony of science and religion. Independent investigation of truth. The elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty.

These were not new ideas to Raina — she'd encountered versions of them in school, in social justice spaces, in the books she read. But in the Bahá'í framework, they were not just ideals. They were principles with practical implications, backed by a vision of world civilization that was both utopian and concrete.

"What I find compelling," Ingrid said one evening — and Raina was startled, because Ingrid usually sat in study circles with her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised — "is the architecture. Not the buildings, though those are excellent. The architecture of the ideas. They fit together like a system. Each principle supports the others. Remove one, and the structure weakens."

"You're analyzing a religion like a building," Navid said.

"I'm a designer. I analyze everything like a building. And this one has good bones."

Raina laughed, and the laugh surprised her, because she realized she was happy. Genuinely, uncomplicated happy. For the first time in years, she was not performing happiness or pretending at contentment. She was simply present in a moment, with people she cared about, engaged in questions that mattered.

Was this what faith felt like? Not certainty — she was nowhere near certainty. But engagement. The willingness to sit with the questions and not run from them.

She called Abuela Rosa that Sunday. "Abuela, do you think God is real?"

"Of course."

"How do you know?"

"Because when I talk to Him, someone listens. Not in words. In the way things unfold. In the way the right person appears when I need them. In the way beauty exists in the world when it doesn't have to. Sunsets don't have to be beautiful, mija. But they are. That is God showing off."

Raina laughed. "I think I'm beginning to understand something."

"What?"

"That understanding doesn't come all at once. It comes in pieces. Like a garden. One seed at a time."

"Now you sound like a Bahá'í."

"Maybe I am. A little."

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In February, Navid's family was arrested.

Navid left the dining hall without speaking. Raina followed him to the garden — the upper terrace, where you could see the whole bay of Haifa spread out below, silver in the moonlight.

He was standing at the railing, his hands gripping the stone, his whole body shaking.

"They took them," he said. "My parents. My mother is sixty-two. She has a bad heart. And they took her to prison because of what she believes."

Raina didn't know what to say. There was nothing to say. She stood beside him and put her hand on his arm and said nothing.

They stood like that for a long time — two young people on a mountaintop above the Mediterranean, one of them broken with worry, the other broken with the helplessness of watching someone you love suffer something you can't fix.

"I should be there," Navid said. "I should be in Iran."

"If you were in Iran, they'd arrest you too."

"Then at least I would be with them."

"And then who would fight for them from outside?"

"I hate this," Navid said. "I hate that my family is punished for believing in unity. In peace. In the oneness of humanity. These are not crimes. These are virtues."

"I know."

"The world should know. Everyone should know what is happening."

"Then tell them. That's what you're here for. That's why your parents sent you."

Navid was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "My father wrote me a letter before I left Iran. He said, 'You are going to a place where you will be free to be who you are. Do not waste that freedom. Use it. Speak. Build. Serve. Be the person we cannot be in this country, and one day, God willing, we will be free to be that person too.'"

He wiped his eyes. "I will not waste it."

Over the following weeks, Navid wrote letters — to human rights organizations, to media outlets, to government officials. Raina helped him. So did Tendai, Ingrid, Ayumi, and the other volunteers. They held a vigil in the gardens. They posted on social media. They contacted every person they knew who had any influence anywhere.

Navid's parents were released three weeks later. The charges were not dropped — they never were — but international pressure had made continued detention embarrassing. They were home, shaken but alive, with the promise of more trouble ahead.

When Navid got the call, he collapsed in the common room, sobbing with relief, surrounded by thirty-one people from twenty-one countries who had become his family.

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Spring arrived in Haifa with wildflowers and a question Raina could no longer avoid.

"What do you want?" Ayumi asked one evening.

"I want to stay here forever."

"You can't stay here forever."

"I know. But I want what this feels like. This... community. This purpose. This sense that what I'm doing matters."

"You can find that anywhere."

"Can I? Because I didn't find it in eighteen years at home."

Ayumi considered this. “See ye not this Sun that shineth in refulgent splendor above the All-Glorious Horizon?”

The whole earth is one country. Raina had heard that phrase a hundred times in the past nine months — one of Bahá'u'lláh's most famous statements. But hearing Ayumi say it in her precise, accented English, in the garden she had helped maintain, surrounded by the evidence of what dedicated service could create — it hit differently.

The earth was one country. And Raina was a citizen of all of it. She didn't have to stay in Haifa to live the life she'd found here. She had to carry Haifa with her — the gardens, the community, the practice of daily beauty and daily service — wherever she went.

She made her decision. She would go to college. She would study environmental science — the gardens had given her a passion for the relationship between humans and the living world. She would find a Bahá'í community wherever she went, or start one. She would keep serving.

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On her last evening in Haifa, Raina climbed to the upper terrace of the gardens and sat on the stone bench where she had stood with Navid during his crisis.

The sun was setting. The Mediterranean was liquid gold. The gardens stretched below her, eighteen terraces of perfection cascading toward the city, and at the center, the golden dome of the Shrine glowed with borrowed light.

One by one, the volunteers found her. Ayumi came first, silent and steady. Then Tendai, with his booming laugh reduced to a quiet smile. Then Ingrid, who had started the year as a skeptic and was leaving it as something else — not a Bahá'í, but no longer a non-Bahá'í. Somewhere in between. Somewhere on the bridge.

Then Navid, who sat beside her and didn't speak, because some things don't need words.

They sat on the terrace as the sun went down and the lights of Haifa came on, one by one, like prayers being answered across the mountainside.

"I'm going to miss this," Raina said.

"This will miss you," Tendai said. "This place remembers everyone who tends it."

"Like a garden," Raina said.

"Exactly like a garden."

She thought about the girl who had arrived nine months ago — confused, directionless, running from a future she didn't want. That girl was gone. In her place was someone who knew that purpose was not something you found. It was something you grew. Slowly, daily, with patience and love and dirty hands.

"Thank you," she said to no one in particular and everyone in general. "For everything."

The Mediterranean darkened. The stars came out. And Raina Torres, gardener, volunteer, seeker, citizen of the world, sat on a mountaintop in Haifa and watched the earth turn toward morning.

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Coming home was harder than leaving.

Portland felt small after Haifa. The bookstore felt trivial after the gardens. Her bedroom felt empty after the volunteer house with its thirty-one roommates and its perpetual soundtrack of languages and laughter.

Raina unpacked her suitcase and sat on her childhood bed and felt the particular grief of return — the knowledge that you have been changed by a place, and the place does not know it, and the people who stayed behind do not fully understand what happened to you.

Her mother hugged her and cried and made rice and beans and said, "You look different."

"I am different."

"Good different?"

"I think so. Yes. Good different."

Abuela Rosa came over that first evening and sat in her chair and said, "Tell me."

So Raina told her. Not the tourist version — not the gardens and the food and the sunsets. The real version. The work and the questions and the friendships and the crisis. Navid's parents. Ingrid's transformation. Ayumi's quiet faith. The Shrine of the Báb at dawn.

“Thou, truly, art the Almighty, the Most Exalted, the Ever-Forgiving, the Most Generous. – L – Glory be to Thee, O my God!” Abuela Rosa said. “But through Christ, through the blessing of the New Testament of Jesus Christ, the Old Testament, the Torah, was translated into six hundred different tongues and spread throughout the world.”

Raina thought for a long time. “Without such devoted service from so many, the marvellous advances made in recent decades, which are evident in the world today, could not have occurred.”

"Are you Bahá'í?"

"I'm becoming something. I'm not sure what yet. But I'm not afraid of the question anymore."

"That's the beginning of wisdom, mija. Not having the answer. Being willing to live with the question."

Raina started college in January. She studied environmental science, as planned. She found the Bahá'í community on campus — three students and a faculty advisor — and started attending their gatherings. She told stories from Haifa. She grew things on her windowsill. She emailed Navid every week and called Ayumi every month and texted Ingrid pictures of landscapes she thought were well-designed.

And every morning, before class, she opened her window and looked at whatever was growing — a plant, a cloud, a sunrise — and said a quiet thank-you to the world for being beautiful enough to believe in.

The year between was over. The rest of her life had begun.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Crimson Ark Publishing publishes fiction for readers of all ages, drawing on the spiritual principles and rich cultural heritage of the Bahá'í Faith. Our stories explore themes of unity, justice, courage, and the transformative power of love — through characters and communities that reflect the beautiful diversity of the human family. Every book is an invitation to see the world not only as it is, but as it could be.

Visit us at crimsonarkpublishing.com