Irina said nothing as she served cake to everyone still at the table, but Rafe thought he saw her lips twitching. “Mom, are you going to let Zoya get away with talking like that?”

“Yes,” Irina said simply.

“Because she’s right,” Karl added, taking a bite of his cake. “This is so good, Rini. Just like always.”

“Zoya is right,” Mercy murmured. “‘Special friend sleepover’ concerns aside, Jeff did us a big favor. I mean, I’m the one who has the most right to be angry about the article, and I’m really not. I’m grateful that Jeff cared enough to alert Irina to Amos’s e-mail. He didn’t have to do that, but he did, and now Amos is here with us.” She squeezed Amos’s hand, then turned a serious gaze onto Rafe and Gideon. “Abigail already thinks you’re an ogre, Gideon. I think we’ve got enough hatred coming at us from the true bad guys. Let’s not feed it with our own anger, okay? I’m tired of being angry.”

Farrah sighed. “You’re right. Why are you always right? And don’t look so happy with yourself.”

Mercy smirked. “I’m not right all that often, so I’ll be happy with myself as long as I want to.”

Rafe felt like Mercy had pulled a plug on his anger, and his shoulders sagged. He stuffed a forkful of cake in his mouth to combat the bad taste of that upcoming apology. “Dammit,” he grumbled.

Mercy patted his face lightly. “I’m not happy about Bunker’s first article. I’m not. I’m embarrassed and I might have to wear a disguise out in public for the rest of my natural life. But here, when it’s just us, I’m safe enough, and I can be clearheaded enough to know that the real danger is a lot worse than a few thousand people seeing me in a less than pleasant light.” She paused and looked around. “Nobody has really talked about the fact that DJ is out there, too. He could be anywhere. Maybe use all that energy to think about following Bunker’s advice. We need to find Eden, and Pastor is the cornerstone. If he embezzled that much money, somebody had to have covered the story. It exists somewhere, in some newspaper archive. We just need to find it. Amos, do you remember any of the articles from back then?”

“No. We were told not to read them, that it was just Satan’s way of making us doubt.”

Rafe was about to scoff but saw the acceptance on Gideon and Mercy’s faces. “That was a thing, huh?” he asked instead.

“We were separate from the world,” Gideon said. “And anyone who came into the compound from the outside had to take an oath to forget about the world and not speak of it. The world was determined to sway us from God and the Elders, so we were not to listen.”

“Mark them,” Mercy murmured. “Have nothing to do with them.”

The words and the eerie, detached way that she spoke them sent a chill down Rafe’s spine.