Since her return, she has transformed as remarkably as her husband, but in reverse.* John, whom I profiled in this magazine in March, traded his American patrimony—money, family—for jihad. Tania traded jihad for America.

The physical distance between the couple seems to have broken John’s spell over his wife. Once compliant, she sought and obtained a divorce, uncontested, and stopped praying. She remade herself into a Texas society woman, so thoroughly adopting the ways of her new home that only her accent reveals her as non-native. From the way she dresses, you’d think she spent the last decade reading Italian Vogue, not the Koran. She goes to concerts. In lieu of a mosque, she attends a Unitarian church. In lieu of a jihadist cleric husband, she has Craig, a boyfriend from Minnesota, who squires her around to the wine bars and bistros of the north Dallas suburbs. Craig makes good money in IT, and although he was raised Christian, he is now a spiritual searcher, ready to sample any faith tradition except, perhaps, his predecessor’s.

To watch the couple together is to forget, at least for a moment, the cause to which Tania until recently devoted her life. She says she has met people skeptical of her conversion from jihadism. The Daily Mail ran a story asking “Has the British beauty who fled her ISIS leader husband for Texas REALLY cut all ties?” She never, in my conversations with her, advocated violence or seriously regretted leaving John at the Syrian border.

And yet there are signs—not of violence, but of a permanent effect of her jihadist brainwashing. She once told me, offhandedly, that she thought the Shia were “not really Muslim”; ISIS is a radical Sunni group, and hatred of the Shia is central to its theology. She never said she wished to return to Syria, but she did lament that so many of the Islamic State’s followers are being bombed “just because they just want to live under a caliphate.” Lines like these come out after hours of perfectly normal conversation.

I cannot, as Queen Elizabeth said, make a window into a woman’s soul: maybe part of her longs for the thrill and purpose that jihadism once provided. But if the Georgelases’s saga teaches anything, it is that people change, and that our capacity for self-reinvention can be immense.

Indeed, the dual transformation of John and Tania is the most American part of this story. What is America, if not a promise of infinite possibility, and ability to transcend one’s origins? John grew up wealthy, Christian, and patriotic; now he is poor, Muslim, and full of hate for his native land. Tania’s metamorphosis has taken the precise opposite form, as if the universe demanded symmetry in their stories, and decreed that she resume the prosperous suburban life that he left behind. They met in the middle, trading fates. His ending is probably already written. Her life, if she’s lucky, is just getting started.

* This article has been updated to clarify that Tania Georgelas has previously spoken with Wood, and subsequently with other journalists, since her return.