The program ended and I returned to BYU. Campus looked the way it

always had, and it would have been easy to forget Cambridge and settle
back into the life I’d had there. But Professor Steinberg was
determined that I not forget. He sent me an application for something
called the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which, he explained, was a
little like the Rhodes Scholarship, but for Cambridge instead of Oxford.
It would provide full funding for me to study at Cambridge, including
tuition, room and board. As far as I was concerned it was comically out
of reach for someone like me, but he insisted that it was not, so I
applied.

Not long after, I noticed another difference, another small shift. I
was spending an evening with my friend Mark, who studied ancient
languages. Like me, and almost everyone at BYU, Mark was Mormon.

“Do you think people should study church history?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
“What if it makes them unhappy?”
I thought I knew what he meant, but I waited for him to explain.
“Many women struggle with their faith after they learn about
polygamy,” he said. “My mother did. I don’t think she’s ever
understood it.”

“I’ve never understood it, either,” I said.
There was a tense silence. He was waiting for me to say my line: that
I was praying for faith. And I had prayed for it, many, many times.

Perhaps both of us were thinking of our history, or perhaps only I
was. I thought of Joseph Smith, who’d had as many as forty wives.