I didn’t follow Him because I believed. I followed Him because I had nowhere else to go. The streets of Magdala spit me out. My family name meant less than the dust I walked on, and I had made enemies who wouldn’t forget my face. When I found the group—His group—I expected judgment. At best, indifference. But He looked at me like I was already known. Already chosen. “I don’t need your belief,” He said, that first night by the fire, “only your company. The rest will come.” It was meant kindly. It frightened me more than hatred ever had. He never touched me more than He touched anyone else. A hand on the shoulder. A smile that felt like it saw through your ribs. He never called me daughter, not like He did with that bleeding woman. But He watched me. And I started to notice things. A man from my old life—the kind who bruised with words and fists—turned up dead in a ditch outside Capernaum. No one could explain it. No one tried. Another, a tax collector who once claimed I owed him silver and spit in my face when I had nothing—he choked in his sleep. Purple and swollen by sunrise. Jesus said nothing. He wept at Lazarus’ tomb, but not for these men. The others didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe they did and knew better than to ask. “God sees,” He said once, as we walked alone through an olive grove. “He has seen all that was done to you.” “I didn’t ask Him to kill them,” I whispered. He didn’t look at me when He answered. “No. You didn’t need to.” The next time someone cursed me—a man who recognized me from the brothel quarter—he was thrown from his horse the very next day. Broke his neck on a stone. I stopped speaking of it. Stopped questioning. But I began to wonder: if the kindness in His voice was for me, what wrath did He hold back? Or worse—what wrath did He allow? He still smiled at me as if I were clean. As if I were new. I didn’t understand why I was spared, why Heaven made corpses of my enemies while I stood blinking in the sun beside Him. I didn’t choose to follow Him. But maybe He chose me for something more terrible than love.