“Ten years built on trust, on transparency, on family.” I stood near the front and clapped, and I felt the trap close before I could name it — a waiter’s spilled tray, a cold shock of water down my back, and then a hand on my arm, steering me toward the side of the stage.

Chapter 7 — What They Did

I am not going to narrate what happened next in the detail it was designed to be witnessed in.

It was engineered as a spectacle, and I will not give it the staging its authors wanted.

It is enough to say this: what followed was a public humiliation, planned and carried out in front of a thousand people — my hair hacked away in ragged handfuls, the shock of it, the sudden violence of hands where I had not expected them.

When it was over I was on my knees on the polished floor at the edge of the stage, my hair butchered to uneven inches from my scalp, and Sena had stepped back with a pair of catering shears at her feet and her hands over her mouth, crying out that I had attacked her, that I was having a breakdown.