Answers do come to those who wait. Read below. I, for one, am just so grateful that I'm here to learn of them. All four of us 'Founders' may survive this after all. Permit me to say that if Aunt Vidala doesn't survive this, the remaining three of us can get along just fine.

Answers. Aunt Lydia pulled through. The only thing Aunt Helena and I had said about it, was that if she hadn't, it would be 50-50 if Aunt Vidala wouldn't have as well. Aunt Helena and I had always been 'good to go' according to Commander Judd, but then again that's probably what he had told Aunt Vidala. In Lydia's absence, the three of us decided things. Since Helena always did what I wanted, we constantly out-voted Aunt Vidala. That pleased Aunt Lydia to hear on her return.

Answers. Baby Nichole ended up in Canada, as did Ofjoseph #3 - the gender traitor. The 'official story' had not yet been released, mainly because it was rather convoluted. What I pieced together was this: neither the Lawrence's, nor the Mackenzies nor even the Waterfords had garnered official suspicion, even as all three of those places could have been seen as - at least - crime scenes. I gathered that the 'official story' had Ofjoseph #3 somehow stabbing Aunt Lydia at the Lawrence's, then making her way to the Waterford's to kidnap baby Nichole (for both reasons as well as means unknown), then the Waterford Handmaid had showed up at the Mackenzies - not only to see her biological offspring (Agnes), but also in her own albeit illegal but desperate search for baby Nichole. That's what we'd got from the Waterfords, that their Offred was searching for baby Nichole. The most convoluted part of it was that the Waterford driver was not to be suspected. Of anything. Apparently Commander Judd had commanded it, so said Aunt Lydia.

Answers. Well this one had not had a question attached to it that fateful night, but it needs to be said - three days later, the Waterford estate burned to the ground. Rumour was that Serena Joy Waterford herself had set the blaze.

Answers. The Waterford Handmaid had been reeducated by me. For her illegal search for baby Nichole, as well as her illegal entry into the Mackenzies. That first morning, I'd taken her from her locked room straight to the disciplinary room. With no resistance, she lay on her stomach and already had her shoes off - she didn't even need restraint. Technically, the bastinado had been flawless. Like the last time, although this time Aunt Lydia was still recovering and didn't witness it. Offred received that lesser punishment for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was that Gilead needed fertile women in service. But she also had not actually endangered the child's life, Agnes's. Tabitha Mackenzie had been clear about that. The Handmaid had also subsequently rescued all in the Waterford house during the fire. And the story was that she'd been at large in the first place in a search for baby Nichole.

And when Lydia returned to her duties, she was angry with me for transferring Offred to the Lawrence estate, where she became Ofjoseph. Number 4. If you ask me, Aunt Lydia had always been blind to that girl. The three of us had made that decision without the files, as Lydia had yet returned. The files having been not yet recovered (more on that in a minute) we just decided - Lydia wouldn't let it go afterwards. However, contradictorially according to her, everything that had gone on at the Waterford house had been Commander Waterford's fault. (Such fault finding of men had to be handled quietly. I mean, this was Gilead!) Lydia made mention of the otherwise taboo account of the former Handmaid's suicide in the Waterford home, reciting what we hadn't even committed to print in the files, Serena Joy telling the Commander, "What did you think was going to happen?"

Also, I had been outside of Lydia's door when I heard her on the phone inside with Commander Judd. It was hard not to, Lydia was yelling so loud. Topic: it was about the murdered supplicant. Apparently, Aunt Lydia was still running into flecks of blood in our meeting room. Just hearing it, I went into a panic attack. I was found later under a table at the Schlafly Café.

Answers. As promised, the files.

I swear, Commander Judd had acted as if the whole episode had been an attempted coup. When I'd been in the service of the senator, I'd read (and heard) about the death of J. Edgar Hoover, the then head and founder of the old FBI. When Hoover had died, the then embattled president of the USA first and foremost had tried to secure Hoover's secret and personal files. It was watching Commander Judd ignore other issues - had Commander Lawrence somehow been complicit in the attack on Aunt Lydia? - simply to secure for himself our Red Centre genealogical files; all that made me think of Hoover.

To be clear, there was no evidence, none whatsoever, to suspect Commander Lawrence in the attack on Aunt Lydia. I want to get that in for extreme clarity. But Judd focusing on the Red Centre took focus off elsewhere.

Ok, on to it. Behind all our backs - after the destruction of the Rachel and Leah Centre, Aunt Lydia had taken it upon herself to move the contents of that closet to Ardua Hall, behind an ancient set of doors. Moved in small subsets. The inner most set of those doors at Ardua Hall were accessible only to Lydia. The only exception was that upon her return to duty as the de facto senior member of us, The Founders, we had our first number of meetings about those files, with some files present. They'd come from the closet, that door remained fixed and locked - but there was only in it what we needed for that day's meeting. I never caught on as to how Aunt Lydia moved those files to and fro, much less securely.