I did ache when I said goodbye to the friends I’d made. I ached when I said goodbye to my grandparents, to my cousins, to my aunts, to my mother. I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable. No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Failing to fully belong in my father’s family, and my mother’s, never stopped feeling like disgrace.

He was my baby brother and I was supposed to take care of him. The fact that I had nothing to give him filled me with shame. The fact that I didn’t want to talk to him filled me with shame. I didn’t want to talk to him because I knew he would talk about Anabel. I didn’t want to think about her, so I couldn’t think about him. I shoved my phone back in my purse, left his text unanswered. My father, I thought, would have been disappointed in me.

He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

“I wondered, years later, if my mother knew what would happen, in the way that only mothers know about their children. I don’t mean that she knew what would happen, exactly. My parents, such as they were, what knowledge they had about the world, could never imagine it. How the world would consume me, how perfect strangers would treat my body like a science experiment. They had no idea that whatever was going on with me was a “medical issue” to the outside world, or that what should have been my private business would be used to continue a public conversation about gender and biological sex that the world had been having for thousands of years.

She snapped the book closed, put it on the fridge, screwed the Marmite a bit too aggressively tight and put a doily over the jam. “It is difficult to describe now, but you felt like you were seen as a one-dimensional being, as if you had no roots, no culture that could give you depth or complexity. When you did something unusual, it was simply luck, and you would soon be exposed as the fraud and thief you really were.”

“Was it not perhaps a kind of inferiority on your part that was in fact not the fault of the English?”

My mother sighed. “It probably played a role. But if inferiority is a given and you want a healthy country, then the elimination of that inferiority must be part of everybody’s plan, not the naked intensification thereof.

“You must have no illusions about this: those people are masters at the art of belittling. They loosen in you a weathervane of hate. They decapitate you with one sentence, with a single adjective sink deadly poisonous teeth into you. You fight futilely for your life . . .”