She was like no mental health professional I’d ever met before. Mental health professionals, in my experience, always wore muted, subtle colors, not bright purple from head to toe. I’d always assumed their desaturated palettes were because they didn’t want to project their personalities too much. They were the ultimate neutral canvas, and if they did wear any adornments, it was usually a beaded earring or some kind of rustic scarf, the sort of scarf that screamed “I’m an academic.” The kind of scarf you could imagine engaged in deep discussions about Freud in an ivy-walled building. I flicked my eyes up at her wall and scanned it, running them over the degrees that lined it, just to confirm she was who she claimed to be. And then my eyes stopped. It took my brain a few moments to figure out what I was looking at, but when I did, I tried to stifle my gasp.

Sure, it was abstract, sure it was blue and purple and glittery, sure there were butterflies flapping about on it. But when I realized what the subject matter was, really was, well . . .

What would I call it exactly, vagina art? I looked at the certificate that hung next to the painting. Certified Sex Therapist.

I took a step backward. “I’m not sure . . . I mean, am I at the right place?” I asked the woman wearing the bright, purple kimono dress with pink and yellow tassels that flapped in the breeze. “Are you a . . .”—I could barely get the words out—“sex therapist?”

“Sure.” She nodded. “But that’s just one of my specializations.”

“Okay,” I muttered reticently.

“Are you here for that?” she asked, her tone dead serious.

“What!?” I spluttered, almost choking on a fleck of saliva I’d inhaled in my shocked state. “No, oh, no, that’s not . . . I mean, I’m not . . . that’s a—”

“A hard no?” she asked with a smile.

I nodded quickly, dying of embarrassment inside.

“Well, no worries,” she said casually, as if this conversation didn’t embarrass her in the slightest. “Come outside.” She waved her arm at me. “Like I said, it’s perfect timing, mos.”

Mos? She was mixing some Afrikaans slang into her speech, something that many Capetonians of mixed racial descent did. I’d just never heard a psychologist be so informal before, and it threw me a little—although I did like the way it sounded. It made the language transform into something more vibrant and alive-sounding, like mixing paint colors together to create a totally unique color.

I walked onto a patio that faced a large garden. It was beautiful here, I had to admit that. Table Mountain rose in the distance, and her garden was one of those overgrown types where things had been left to go wild and tangle, like something out of a fairy tale.