“I ran into him at the pub one evening. I didn’t even know he was in town.We got talking, and soon the group of people he was with merged with the group I was with and we ended up chatting for hours. I told him about the two kittens I’d just got, and he said he’d love to see them. So at closing time, I invited him back to my place.”

“Did you have any flatmates?” asked the academic. Like the rest of us, she was seeing the parallels between this story and hers.

“No, at that stage I was living alone. I was already a postgraduate and had enough bursary money that I could afford not to share. Anyway, we’d both been drinking all evening, but when we got back to my place, I opened a bottle of wine for us. He admired the kittens and we sat on the sofa together to let them climb all over us. I remember him saying something about being attracted to me, but I immediately said that nothing could ever happen because of my sister.”

There was more nodding and murmurs of agreement.

“After that it gets fuzzy because I’d been drinking so much. I think the cats settled in their basket and went to sleep.We stayed on the sofa drinking and talking. I remember putting my feet in his lap, so he could rub them. My sister always said he gave the best foot rubs. Then we started kissing, but I said, ‘This is wrong. We mustn’t do this.’ So, we broke apart. But then after a while we were kissing again.”

There was silence in the venue. The delegates were leaning forward, straining to catch her words as her voice got softer and softer. She rubbed her hands over her face and took a deep breath.

“Then it gets really fuzzy. I remember us having sex. I remember saying my sister’s name. Someone was laughing. For years, I thought it was me, but my therapist says it must have been him. We woke up in my bed the next morning. I don’t even remember how we got there. There were two used condoms—one in the sitting room and one in the bedroom. I flushed them away without thinking. I flushed away the evidence. Things were awkward between us that morning. He had a cup of coffee and a bowl of cornflakes and left. I knew he was flying back to Johannesburg that afternoon.

“I spent most of the day lying on my sofa with the curtains closed. I felt terrible. My mouth was dry. I had a pounding headache and my eyeballs throbbed. I couldn’t stomach any food. My therapist says this was my body’s way of telling me I’d been violated.”

“What happened next?” asked the facilitator.