Finally, he turned it off. He knew if he didn’t, he’d go upstairs to her room, and he’d already decided he couldn’t do that.

To distract himself, he surfed the web on his phone. At first, he was reading sports articles, but before long his thoughts reverted back to Tia, and he entered her real name—Sarah Isaac—into his browser just to see what might come up.

Only links about random women with the same name populated his screen. So he started to search Mennonites and Mennonites of Iowa to learn more about what she’d been taught as a child. He couldn’t believe that she’d been someone else, a young Mennonite girl who, from what he was reading, likely only went to school through the eighth grade and was expected to marry a man with a bowl cut who would most likely refuse to allow her to have her own cell phone.

How had the modern world not corrected such traditional behavior? He found no answer for that. But he learned that most Amish and a lot of Mennonites spoke Pennsylvania Dutch and wondered if Tia knew the language. Was that how her parents communicated with her? Was that the language her nieces and nephews were being taught?

According to various sources, Anabaptists were part of the Protestant radical reform movement of the sixteenth century, when some Christians broke off from the Catholic Church. Any religion, let alone one so all-pervasive it was actually a culture, was completely foreign to him, which was partly why he found Tia’s background fascinating.

He was so caught up learning about the Mennonites that several hours passed while he followed link after link, reading facts he’d never heard before. Some Mennonite groups didn’t have to pay social-security taxes because they pulled together as a community to take care of their elderly. They were Christian but didn’t celebrate Christmas the way most other Americans did. And they believed so strongly that vanity was a sin they often pulled out their own teeth rather than pay to maintain them.

No wonder Tia’s parents were mortified that she’d become an actress and felt God had intervened to stop her. If she were Amish instead of Mennonite, she’d probably never be allowed back, even for a visit.

Given how insulated and restrictive the Mennonite communities were, he would’ve assumed the number of people in them would be shrinking, maybe even hanging on the brink of extinction. But he was surprised to find that wasn’t the case. The opposite was actually occurring. These communities were growing, largely due to the huge size of their families. Many had ten or more children, and because their children were only educated to the eighth grade and were effectively cut off from the outside world, leaving wasn’t much of an option.