Last year, Wisan allowed Colgrove to move into this house. It once belonged to John Nielsen Jeffs, a successful businessman as well as a stepbrother and close ally of Warren Jeffs’. Not long after Warren disappeared, his stepbrother and other pillars of the community left too, moving to Texas, Nevada, South Dakota, and other outposts. The home has 19 bedrooms and 23 bathrooms—four with Jacuzzis—and a waterfall in the yard. The three kitchens were used to feed John Nielsen Jeffs’ five wives and more than a dozen children. It is a polygamist’s dream home.

Meanwhile, Colgrove had been living a polygamist’s nightmare. She is the great-granddaughter of one of the men who founded the Short Creek community. But by the time she was a teenager, her family was on the outs with the priesthood, and her father struggled to support his three wives and 36 children. Colgrove was married off to a 45-year-old man shortly after she turned 18. She was his third wife, and such was her misery that after a year, she made up her mind to have a one-night stand with a nonpolygamist she knew from work. Afterward, Colgrove went to her father and her husband and told them she was no longer worthy of the marriage. At 20, she married again, this time to a polygamist in Salt Lake City who had one wife. Stefanie says she spent most of her time in the basement, where she tended to her newborn son. After less than two years, Colgrove left her second husband and married a Lutheran from Nevada. When the couple heard that Warren Jeffs was on the lam, Colgrove convinced her husband to move to Short Creek.

"When you grow up around this kind of land," Colgrove says, "it's the only kind of beauty you know."

She applied to take over a house from the trust and made an appeal to Wisan: Let us live here, and we will help others. Wisan approved, with the caveat that the house also shelter women and children who have been banished or are fleeing the F.L.D.S. It’s called the Affinity Home.

As Colgrove tells this story, she asks if I’d mind running an errand with her to get milk and cheese for her brood. We drive in her ramshackle pickup to the only dairy store in town. “Are you ready for this?” she asks me. “I hope it doesn’t embarrass you that I’m paying in nickels and dimes.” Colgrove picks up an old baby-wipe container, filthy and full of change.

Inside the store, women in long dresses and braids quickly turn away from us. Men grab their sons tightly by the wrists and studiously avoid Colgrove as she pulls down a brick of cheddar cheese and a gallon of milk. Children stare at Colgrove, who wears jeans and bedroom slippers.

“They used to treat me like a ghost,” Colgrove says after saying hello to each person ignoring her, “but now I don’t let them.”

How this all came to pass is rooted in the Mormon Church’s early history. In the summer of 1843, Church of the Latter-Day Saints’ founder Joseph Smith announced a heavenly revelation stating that plural marriage was required to receive the highest glory from God. The following year, Smith and his closest followers were jailed, and in 1879, the Supreme Court upheld a congressional prohibition on the practice. In 1890, the Mormon Church’s fourth president, Wilford ­Woodruff, ­received a divine revelation decreeing that plural marriage should end. But it did not. Followers continued to practice polygamy in secret, splintering off from the main church.