He shrugged. “They’re not as bad as they look.”

“Well, they don’t look great,” I joked, completely lying and barely hiding it. At that point he could be wearing full pastor robes and I’d still be picturing him naked any chance I got.

“So you grew up in this world?” he asked. “What was that like?”

I could imagine the confusion and judgment on his face as I told him about my parents: my mother, the ever-obeying wife; and my father, the domineering wannabe preacher. No one ever understands, especially not someone who grew up more closely tied to society. In the same way I don’t understand how Ruthie grew up having so much freedom.

“It was fine,” I said. “Like this but with worse punishments.”

He nodded and could probably tell by my tone that I didn’t want to discuss it more. “Do you wish it had been different?”

I used to. I used to spend hours at night flipping through those magazines wishing I lived in the same world as those women, that I had the same knowledge and resources. That I had different parents and lived in New York City and had friends I met in school. And once my eyes got heavy and I slipped the magazine back under my mattress, I’d say a little prayer that maybe when I woke up, I could be in a different bed, in a different home, in a different life. But it never happened. So I had to find another way out.

“Sometimes,” I said, uninterested in getting into the details; in telling him yes, I’d change everything about my childhood if I could. But no one wants to hear that. “Do you?” I could sense him slowing down so I met his pace, too. “Do you ever regret the stuff you did that got you here?”

He thought about it for a long time. “I don’t have regrets,” he said finally, something I recognized even at the time as a lofty thing for an eighteen-year-old to announce. “If it was the right thing to do in the moment, it was the right thing. So you take that in stride and move on.”

This place was all about regrets—wielding them and anticipating them. You’ll regret not saving yourself for your husband, you’ll regret having a drink, you’ll regret not obeying your parents and elders. You’ll regret eating that pizza, that ice cream cone, that bowl of cereal.

But do you really? I haven’t so far. I’ve enjoyed it all.

Maybe I don’t have regrets either.

Timothy stopped walking and the cooler dropped with an echoey thud to the hard forest floor. “This is perfect,” he said as we stood in a clearing small enough to fit only our blanket, surrounded on two sides by a thick brush.