The Bitter Star
The silence has passed, and the world Hannah Reid loves gets back up — kinder, calmer, more grateful than ever. The man with no face has been healed, live, on every screen, before a watching nation; and relief, by quiet degrees, becomes something closer to worship.
Hannah keeps doing her rounds, a community nurse in Melbourne's outer south-east growth corridor, which now answers to a single authority. Then the kind order asks for one thing more than convenience — a small, reasonable pledge of belonging, without which no one can buy, work, or be cared for — and a grateful country discovers what it will kneel for.
The wedding never came; the love never ended. Josh is rising inside the system she can no longer bless.
As the water turns bitter and the cost stops being abstract, Hannah must learn what her faith is worth when keeping it costs everything.
