Serena Waterford,
You have done cruel and calculating things since the beginning of this tale, yet to call you purely evil feels incomplete. The more I uncover your layers, the more I see you as something else—perhaps a privileged victim, if such a thing can exist. You have suffered, you have lost, and in losing, you’ve been stripped of your identity just as much as June was stripped of hers.
You were once a dreamer, and yes, you made those dreams come true. But the reality they birthed—the way your ideals unraveled and exposed the worst in everyone, including your husband, including yourself—that was never the future you imagined. You are in too deep now, drowning in a world built from your own convictions. How painful must it be to watch your faith, once so unwavering, slowly erode? How much must it hurt to give up the brilliance that once defined you?
You still show glimmers of good—the way you cared for the baby, and at times, in your own way, even for June. There was a softness in how you welcomed Eden, flickers of kindness untouched by Gilead’s cruelty. And sometimes, when you fight back against your husband, that old fighter resurfaces—the woman who once wrote, who once stood in the middle of an angry crowd, who once wanted more.
You wrote a book for women because you believed in your own vision for them, for the world. And yet, the realization of that vision rendered your own words obsolete. The power you fought for is now a cage. The submission you preached is now your sentence. Maybe that is why you resent June so deeply—because in her defiance, she reminds you of what you could have been, of what you still could be, if only you allowed yourself to remember.
