“I’m just as messy and fucked up. I thought we’d already established that.”

Charlene scrubs a hand over her face. “I know, but my mom’s already so much crazy—I didn’t know if you could handle any more. I mean, who raises their child in a commune and thinks it’s okay? And not just any commune, but a batshit crazy one where women are treated like property. The whole thing is like a bad talk show episode.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t be able to handle it?”

She sighs. “It wasn’t you specifically. I’ve never told anyone, ever. We never talked about it after we left. It was like . . .” She pauses, maybe searching for the words. “It was all a terrible nightmare. My mom told me not to say anything because we didn’t want Frank to find us and bring us back there.”

She runs her hands up and down her legs. “I remember the night we ran. My mom woke me up in the middle of the night, and we escaped through a hole in the barbed-wire fence.”

“Barbed-wire fence?” It sounds more like prison than a home.

“Yeah, it was meant to keep the bad guys out. Anyway, there was a car waiting for us down the road. I had to hotwire it because she was too panicked to find the key. I didn’t even know what we were running from at the time.”

Her eyes are the kind of haunted I associate with old memories made new again.

“We drove for hours before we finally stopped at a little diner somewhere in Nebraska. I’d never been to a restaurant, never seen a TV before, never shopped in a grocery store, never even worn a pair of pants, Darren. It was such a shock to realize the world was so much bigger than what I knew. It was too much to process. I don’t remember it clearly at all—more like it was some messed-up recurring dream. And reliving it, trying to explain it . . . My extremes were the opposite of yours, Darren. I went from isolation to inclusion so quickly it was impossible to reconcile.”

Charlene explains how her mom got pregnant before she graduated from high school. The guy was a year older, and they ran off together. She always wanted to travel, and he was a trucker. Turns out babies cramp the trucking lifestyle. So one day he dropped her off at a place called The Harvest Co-op, or what Charlene has always referred to as “The Ranch,” located in the middle of Utah, and left her there with her infant baby. Penniless. With no identification.

And Frank took them in with open arms. He welcomed her into “the fold.” It was fantastic. They were a self-contained unit. They earned their own way and functioned like a family, and for a woman who came from a small, isolated town where her parents threatened to help her get rid of the baby without seeing a doctor, it’s not hard to understand why she ran, and why she stayed where she was for as long as she did.

While her mother might’ve known her situation wasn’t normal or conventional, it was certainly preferable. Until apparently it wasn’t anymore.

“So how did you get out, and what prompted leaving?” I ask, still trying to figure that part out.

“I started my period,” Charlene mumbles, and her cheeks flush.

“I don’t think I understand.”

“My mom worried it wasn’t going to be safe for me anymore. We were in extreme isolation, and there were a lot of restrictions. I never left the compound. I’d been told it was dangerous and forbidden. We didn’t have identification. We were dependent on Frank for everything, and I was getting older.”

It finally clicks as to what she means. “I should’ve killed that fucker when I had the chance.”

Charlene ducks her head. “Don’t say that.”

“Charlene, that shit is fucked up. Far worse than anything I went through as a kid. That guy needs to be put behind bars or six feet under.”

She rolls whatever she had between her fingers faster and faster until it pings on the table. She scrambles to grab it, but I catch it mid-bounce. It’s a pearl. I glance up to where her fingers dance nervously around her throat.

“It broke when Da—Frank tried to grab me.” She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes, and her shoulders curl forward.

I run a gentle palm over the back of her head. “It’s okay. We’ll get it restrung again.”

“I think I lost half the pearls in the garden this time, or between the stones. We’ll never find them all.”

“So I’ll add new ones until it fits.” I never told her that the first time I had the ancient, broken necklace restrung for her, I replaced all but a few of the original pearls since none of them were real. These were. And I definitely won’t be sharing that with her, either.