I thought about the hundreds of cups of tea I had finished to the last drop while Ottoline smiled and watched to be sure I left nothing behind.

What happened in me, sitting across from Thandeka, was not tears but a terrible reorganization — two years of my life rewriting themselves in the space of a single sentence.

Every symptom I had spent so long frightened by, every unexplained failure of my own body, every appointment where a doctor frowned at my numbers and said we’re not sure why, all of it turned over at once and showed me its true face.

I had not been sick.

I had been poisoned, which is a different thing entirely, and the difference is the difference between misfortune and murder.

For two years I had lain awake afraid I was dying of some mystery my doctors couldn’t name, and I had been comforted, through all of it, by the tender presence of the very woman administering the mystery.