Hannah spends the first month of her sentence in isolation in prison where a live-feed broadcasts her image around the world. Because she refused to name her abortion care provider or Aidan, Hannah was sentenced to 16 years as a chrome, which also meant that she would be unable to bear children during that time because of an implant. Unwilling to shame the married Dale, Hannah had an illegal abortion and was picked up immediately afterwards and convicted of the murder of her fetus. Hannah and the reverend began an affair leading to Hannah's pregnancy.

Hannah belonged to a mega-church and after her father was the victim of a terror attack which threatened to leave him partially blind her family was offered comfort by the reverend Aidan Dale. Hannah lives in Texas after a great outbreak of a sexually transmitted infection caused the majority of women of the world to become sterile leading to widespread panic, the rise of Christianity, and the overturning of Roe v. In an unspecified future 26-year-old Hannah Payne awakes in a prison cell having been chromed (i.e. The novel is a dystopian reimagining of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, set in a future theocratic America where rather than being imprisoned and rehabilitated, criminals are punished by being 'chromed' – having their skin color genetically altered to fit their crime – and released into the general population to survive as best they can. It has been translated into French, Spanish, Turkish, German, Portuguese and Chinese. When She Woke is the second novel by American author Hillary Jordan, published in October 2011.

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan