JULIAN

I was used to keeping up a public façade when my shame bells were tolling inside me. I’d spent many, many Sunday afternoons placing down dinner plates in front of Grace’s friends alongside hers, and making conversation with them as though it was normal. How are you this week? How was college? The questions meant nothing. The look in their eyes said it all. They were thinking of how I’d been roping them, bound and used like sluts, posing for me like they were porn stars, but nobody else knew it.

Crenham Drive was no different. They had no sense of the shame bells under my public façade, either....