Billy

Billy’s hug once bruised my sternum when we were fifteen. I took the injury to mean I was lovable. Now, here we were three decades later in Mallorca, where he lived—worlds away from New York City and the cult where we’d first met.

Billy and his sisters had grown up in that cult, where he was groomed early on to preach to people twice his age. He was all the things I wasn’t: confident, easygoing, blond. I’d been raised differently—my single mother had turned such a blind eye to religion that she didn’t see when it swallowed me whole—yet Billy and I had both ended up in the same place.