The Covenant of Belonging
The world has been healed — and in the Berlin congregation that finally made Sabine Krüger one of its own, relief has begun, softly, to kneel. When the new order offers a covenant of belonging, her church is invited to host it as a sacrament: candles, vows, hands laid on bowed heads.
Sabine has spent a lifetime aching to be chosen. Now the daughter she loves asks her to come forward and stand beside her — and Sabine cannot find a single wrong word in the beautiful liturgy, only a wordless certainty that the light in the room is coming from the wrong place.
She has nothing but an old diary, and a friend who says the covenant's kindest sentence is the one it can never say. When belonging becomes worship and refusing becomes cruelty, can a woman who only ever wanted to be wanted stay in her seat?
