[...] she had walked with her father up to her coach, and the three of them had sat on the small white plastic bench poolside, Coach in center, the tiny bench creaking under unusual nonprepubescent weight, the sound of two dozen pairs of young arms breaking the water and the smell of chlorine she already felt like she missed, and she had quietly sobbed and looked down at the red-tile floor while her father did the half-lying for her. She had never seen an adult enter the pool in civilian clothes before.

Many years later, when the moral weight of her dad’s lies on her behalf appeared less significant, she still regarded her retirement from the pool as the watershed moment of her youth. It had been the one time in her life she had taken a decision clearly against what was expected of her, against a community she belonged to, against family tradition. And it had felt horrible. In a way, all her life since then, her gradually decreasing but still joyful involvement with the Church, her luminous years in Provo, her budding career at the Las Vegas Sun, her rooming with and pretty much taking care of Orson—all of it could be described not as a forced adherence to an externally set, premade mold, but as a conscious, happy convergence of her personal wants and needs with the expectations of her community. Really, she had chosen all of it, and it all fit. It felt right.