The jet lag from the twelve-hour flight from London to Tokyo was kicking in as I found an aisle seat in the conference hall. I felt disconnected and scared, the notes that I had worked on after one glass of Australian Shiraz too many on the flight suddenly unfit for purpose – my insights banal, the statistics dull, my spiel nowhere near good enough to impress all these start-up-building, high achievers gathered here today from every corner of the planet. I could feel it in my tired, slightly hungover bones. This would not go well.

The conference hall itself was massive, the space far bigger than I was expecting and half the speeches were not even in English. Delegates bleary from their own long-haul flights bolted early morning coffee and fiddled with flimsy black plastic headphones that provided simultaneous translation in the language of your choice.

Up on stage an image of my face appeared on the screen behind the moderator. As she began a brief introduction to my company, I stared beyond the huge tinted windows of the hall where Tokyo was luminous with the pink cherry blossoms of spring. I could just go now, I thought. Just … go. But as I seriously contemplated running away, I heard my father’s voice.

‘You bought the ticket, Tara!’ my dad would have told me.

He had been telling me exactly the same thing all my life. Thought you were a big girl who could ride her bike without stabilisers? Well, you bought the ticket! Thought you could get away with drinking vodka shots with your mates without getting sick? You bought the ticket! Whenever I took an uncertain step, from my early childhood memory to my wild teenage years to starting up my own company, my dad would be there to remind me – not unkindly – that what went wrong was usually nobody’s fault but mine.

You bought the ticket, Tara! Meaning – your choice, your consequences.

I had not literally bought the ticket to come here, of course. My travel expenses – a non-flexible business class return on British Airways, two nights in a junior suite at the Park Hyatt Tokyo – had been paid for by the conference, which was bringing together a few hundred scrappy young female entrepreneurs who had built their businesses up from nothing. Women like me. I could have found a hundred ways to get out of coming. But flattered by the invitation – despite that magazine cover, my firm was only a three-desk operation jammed into a small office at the end of a mews – and excited to see Tokyo for the first time, I said – count me in. I bought the ticket, didn’t I?

‘So please welcome …’

Then I felt the light touch of a hand on my arm. The man in the next seat. Unlike most of the people in the hall, he was wearing a suit and tie. And he was older than most of us, though not yet old.