chapter 21

“That must have been traumatic.” He comes over and hands me a glass, but he doesn’t sit beside me. Instead, he takes an armchair, leaning back comfortably with a highball glass of something amber-colored.

I’m not sure if I should downplay what the experience was like. It was definitely traumatic. After sitting in a bare office room, shivering in my ceremonial robe while Mother and Father screamed at me, I was whisked away home to collect as much as I could stuff into my luggage in thirty minutes. A change of clothes and I was on a private plane to an uncertain future.

Not even my sisters knew what happened to me. Not even my best friends.

Yet, I can blurt it all out to this stranger. “When I arrived in London, I didn’t even have a place to stay. I went to a hotel and used the credit card Father gave me. A few days later, he wired me money and a promise that I would be taken care of, but at seventeen, with nothing but my passport and someone else’s money, it was difficult to get an apa