The Testaments

The three narratives converge as Agnes (now Aunt Victoria) and the girl known as Jade — actually Nicole, the "Baby Nicole" smuggled out of Gilead as an infant and raised in Canada as Daisy — are drawn into Aunt Lydia's long-hidden double game. Lydia, who has secretly been Mayday's mole inside Gilead's ruling Aunts for years, reveals Nicole's true identity to Agnes and Becka (Aunt Immortelle) and recruits all three young women to smuggle a trove of incriminating files about Gilead's Commanders out of the country. The files are hidden as a microdot embedded in Nicole's cruciform tattoo. When Commander Judd's plan to marry Nicole forces the timeline forward, Agnes and Nicole flee early, assaulting Aunt Vidala along the way, and travel by bus, on foot, and finally by boat down the Penobscot River and across into Canadian waters, reaching Campobello Island where Mayday operatives bring them to their biological mother.

Becka does not go with them. To preserve the cover story that "Jade" ran off with a plumber and buy the escapees time, she hides herself away and is later found dead inside a water cistern. Aunt Lydia, meanwhile, protects her own position and buys additional time for the escape by falsely telling Aunt Elizabeth that Vidala accused Lydia of the assault, engineering Vidala's death at Elizabeth's hands. Once Nicole's microdot reaches Mayday and the Canadian press, the exposed corruption, adultery, and murders among Gilead's elite trigger a scandal and purge among the Commanders, which escalates into a military coup and popular uprising. Gilead's grip collapses, and the United States is restored.

Having completed her decades-long deception, Aunt Lydia closes her own written account — the Ardua Hall Holograph — by explaining that she intends to take a fatal overdose of morphine rather than risk capture, interrogation, and execution once Gilead's collapse exposes her role, ending her testimony on the eve of her planned suicide.

The novel closes with a metafictional epilogue set generations later: a partial transcript of the Thirteenth Symposium on Gileadean Studies in the year 2197, presented by Professor James Darcy Pieixoto. He discusses the difficulty of authenticating the three testimonies — Lydia's holograph and the witness accounts of Agnes and Nicole — and raises the possibility, which he cannot confirm, that their biological mother was Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid's Tale. He also suggests that Lydia's confession of being the Mayday mole may itself have been a cover story shielding the real operative's identity. He ends by describing a memorial statue erected for Becka in honor of her sacrifice, whose dedication ceremony was attended by Agnes and Nicole together with their husbands, children, their mother, and their respective fathers.

Gilead has fallen and the United States has been restored by the book's end, so a reader moving forward should know where the surviving major figures ended up. Agnes Jemima, raised in Boston as the adopted daughter of Commander Kyle, discovered as a teenager that she was the biological daughter of a Handmaid and half-sister to a girl smuggled out of Gilead as an infant. To escape being married off to the powerful Commander Judd, Agnes became a Supplicant and trained as an Aunt, taking the name Aunt Victoria, alongside her friend Becka (Aunt Immortelle), whose father had been sexually abusing her for years.

Daisy, raised in Toronto by Neil and Melanie (who ran a Mayday front operation), learned after her adoptive parents were murdered by Gileadean agents that she was actually "Baby Nicole," the infant famously smuggled to Canada by her Handmaid mother — a case Gilead had used for years as propaganda. Mayday sent her undercover into Gilead as a street girl named Jade, where she was taken in by the Pearl Girls and placed under Agnes and Becka's care.

Aunt Lydia — the formidable, feared architect of the Aunts' power structure since Gilead's founding — was revealed to have secretly been Mayday's inside mole all along, working for years to gather evidence against Gilead's ruling elite. She exposed Nicole's identity to Agnes and Becka and organized a plan to smuggle a data cache (hidden in a microdot on Nicole's tattoo) out of the country, exposing corruption, adultery, and murder among top Commanders, including Judd and Agnes's own adoptive father.

The escape had to be moved up when Judd decided to marry Nicole himself. Agnes and Nicole fled together, eventually reaching Canada and reuniting with their biological mother. Becka stayed behind to maintain their cover story and was later found dead, having hidden herself to protect the others; she is remembered afterward as a hero of the resistance. Aunt Lydia, having quietly eliminated a rival Aunt (Vidala) to protect her cover, ended her own account by stating her intention to take her own life rather than be captured once her role came to light.

The leaked files ignited a scandal that triggered a purge, a military coup, and a popular uprising, causing Gilead's collapse and the restoration of the United States. A framing epilogue, set nearly two centuries later at an academic symposium, reveals these events are being studied as history through the surviving testimonies of Lydia, Agnes, and Nicole, and raises an unresolved, unconfirmed possibility that Agnes and Nicole's birth mother may have been Offred, the narrator of the first book — a thread left open rather than confirmed. Going forward, the open questions are the true identity of Offred, the long-term fates of Agnes and Nicole in the restored United States, and how much of the "Aunt Lydia as mole" story was itself a deliberate cover for someone else.