That childhood bliss ended abruptly in the summer of my fourteenth year. The day a man by the name of Daniel Lapp came to our house with murder on his mind. I lost my innocence that day. I lost my ability to trust. My capacity to forgive. My faith in both God and family. I nearly lost my life, and in the weeks following many times I wished I had.

I haven’t been here since Mamm’s funeral two years ago. Most Amish probably think avoiding my siblings the way I do is shameful. But I have my reasons.

I never would have returned to Painters Mill at all if it hadn’t been for my mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer three years ago. But Mamm and I had always shared a special bond. She’d been supportive of me when others had not—especially when I informed my parents that I wouldn’t be joining the church. I wasn’t baptized after my rumspringa or “running around” period. Mamm disapproved, but she never judged. And she never stopped loving me.

At the age of eighteen, I moved to Columbus and spent the next year broke and miserable and more lost than I’d ever been in my life. An unlikely friendship and, eventually, an even more unlikely job saved me. Gina Colorosa taught me how to not be Amish and gave me a crash course in all the wicked ways of the “English,” or non-Amish. Ravenous for new experiences, I was a quick study. Within a month of knowing her, we were roommates living on fast food, Heineken and Marlboro Lights 100’s. She was a dispatcher with the Columbus PD and helped me land a job answering phones at a police substation near downtown. In the following weeks that minimum-wage position became my world—and my salvation.

Gina and I enrolled in the community college, our collective sights set on criminal justice degrees. It was one of the most satisfying and exciting times of my life. Mamm took the bus to Columbus for my graduation. Riding in a motorized vehicle was a direct violation of the Ordnung, the rules of our church district, but my mother did it anyway. For that, I’ll always be thankful to her. I introduced her to Gina, and told her we were going to enroll in the police academy. Mamm didn’t understand, but she never condemned me. It was the last time I saw her before her diagnosis of cancer. Datt passed suddenly of a stroke six months after I graduated. I didn’t return for his funeral. But I came back for Mamm. To be with her during her final days. To help with the farm. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

But in all honesty, my roots had been calling to me for quite some time. Looking back, I realize it was more than my mother’s impending death that brought me back. Deep inside I knew the time had come for me to face my family—and a past I’d been running away from for over a decade.