A detailed chronicle of the growing up of a girl from a church-going family: Orthodox gymnasium, weekly confessions and the constant oppression of awareness of her sinfulness, the struggle with unclean - worldly - thoughts. And then - love, leaving the church and a new painful search for herself and God. The author is a Moscow journalist and translator. In the afterword, she thanks Maya Kucherskaya, a writer who has repeatedly raised the topic of man in the church in her books. In modern times, the topic is already risky, but from the angle that Nina Fedorova reveals: apostate reflections, flight from a confessor, whose instructions begin to be perceived by the heroine as a dupe, a description of the parish as a sect, it is completely scandalous. Although the novel also has a deeper, universal layer: the heroine first of all struggles with her fears and defeats them.