“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 car
