In this unflinching memoir, Debra Baker traces her path out of Protestant fundamentalism, from a childhood paralyzed by guilt and contradiction, to a hard-won understanding of authentic kindness and her own voice. This account is her reckoning with—and her liberation from—authority figures who hid their drive to dominate in an unrelenting deity whose wrath was theirs to dispense, and whose mercy was theirs to withhold. What she found on the other side was not the absence of the divine, but the presence of a loving, faithful God who’d been there for her all along.