The candles are already lit when I arrive.

Palo santo threads through the seaside air. On the floor between us, a small altar: crystals, a dried sage bundle, and a miniature owl’s skull. Elle catches me looking at it. The witchiest thing I’ve ever done, she says. She’d found the owl dead on the side of the road, brought it home, and with Google and pure determination, cleaned and preserved it herself. A federal offence under the Migratory Bird Act. But this ain’t no PG story. So if you’re already offended, fuck off now.

She moves around the space the way people do when ritual is muscle memory. Barefoot. Beautiful. Unhurried. She hands me something warm to drink and we sit together on the floor, knees touching, eyes locked.

We set intentions. We breathe. We chant. We don’t explain ourselves to each other, just honour it.

This is Elle White. Divine Feminine Healing Practitioner. Women’s coach. Keeper of the female village.

But it hasn’t always been this.

Before the ceremony, before the sage, before any of this, there was Kansas. A farm. A religious childhood, grounded and ordinary in all the ways childhoods should be. Then came a youth spent touring the world as a pianist and violinist, performing in concert halls she couldn’t have imagined from a Kansas cornfield.

She was talented. Young. Curious. Hungry for experience, but also for love.

Her father once looked at her and said, almost absently, I don’t know how your mom and I made such a beautiful child. Not a compliment. A confusion. As if her beauty was an anomaly he couldn’t quite account for. She filed it away without knowing she was filing it. She carried the wound most women carry quietly: the need for acceptance from a man.

Then…he appeared. Tall, dark, handsome. Oozing sex appeal. The man who would ultimately become the father of her daughter, and who would introduce her to a world most women only whisper about.

Escorting.

Not long into their relationship, he’d begun entertaining the idea of male escorting. Also known as “Luxury Companionship.” There was demand for it in their new Florida territory and the money was good. Very good.

Her initial reaction was visceral. Absolutely not.

But Elle had always been open-minded. A people pleaser at her core. And he was a narcissist, which means the grip was tight and the manipulation so tactful she barely felt it happening. He had a way of making his ideas feel like hers. His needs feel like invitations.

So she drew a line the only way she knew how.

The only way you’re doing this is if I do it with you.

She meant it as a boundary. He heard it as a yes.

It started off as paid threesomes with single guys or swinger couples. Kind of fun, she recounts. The money became the drug, the sex became the needle, and the line she’d drawn quietly dissolved.

Enter “hot wife” culture. Her initiation to PORN.

A subculture with its own language, its own hierarchy, its own intoxicating sense of belonging. By definition: a married woman who has sexual relationships with other people, with the husband’s full agreement, though he is not permitted affairs of his own. The woman is the currency. Desired, shared, worshipped in a way that can feel, for a time, like power.

And in a world full of men conducting quiet affairs, perhaps there’s a certain poetry in that reversal.

For Elle it was the next logical door, and it opened easily.

And behind it: cameras. What did he get out of it? He sold the footage.

Men would just show up at her door unannounced. Organised by her husband. He’d watch, he’d film, and her day’s work was done and dusted.

The money was bigger. The validation was louder. And just like that, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Elle’s demand was escalating. Her prices higher than ever, six, seven, eight thousand dollars for overnights. More for weekends away in lavish locations, temporarily treated like a queen and a whore all at once. The dopamine hit, she says, was unexplainable.

“I was always on. In character,” she tells me. “Like a Hollywood actress, except nobody ever had to recognise me. Or if they did, they never had the balls to say so.

She pauses. “It’s the most masculine job dressed up as a woman.”

I ask her what she means. The expectations, she says. The demands. The relentless drive to perform, to deliver, to always be on and never soft, never just a body that might be tired or hurting or quietly falling apart. Masculine in its metrics, its transaction, its insistence that emotion stays the hell out of it. She had mastered it so completely she stopped noticing what it was costing her.

The drugs. The alcohol. The need to mask up and keep going. What starts as a social lubricant becomes a professional requirement, becomes a daily necessity. Anti-anxiety meds. Antidepressants. An alchemy of coping, constructed so gradually you don’t notice you’re building it until the whole thing is load-bearing, crushing your soul from inside out.

When you buy the ticket, you take the ride. And she was on a rollercoaster, one giving her access to the dark side of reality and herself in equal measure.

There was one night that ended in a panic attack after a near four-hour session with a famous Black porn star known for his girth. She even admits drugging herself with GHB, the date rape drug. She was drunk, high, and overworked. Amateur porn doesn’t offer safety coaches on set. No intimacy coordinator. No one calling cut. Just the talent, cheap equipment, and your most recent STI panel.

She wasn’t always the queen. Sometimes she was just a woman alone in a room.

And yet. Not all of it was what you’d expect.

Some of her clients were end of life, ninety year old men starved of intimacy, which often meant little more than talking and sipping tea. There was a devoted dying woman who encouraged her husband to hire Elle for himself. There was a paraplegic. She laughs telling me she was less prepared for having to lift him from the bed to the wheelchair. And the colostomy bag, she adds, with a look that says that particular detail was not in the brief.

I find myself warming to some of it more than I expected to.

But the moment that broke her open, the only moment I’ve seen her crack when speaking about all of this, wasn’t any of that. Wasn’t the panic attack. Wasn’t the rock bottom that came later, when she finally walked away from the industry and found herself financially gutted, rebuilding from a ground floor with no elevator.

It was her daughter.

She was still working when she fell pregnant. Still showing up, still performing, still on. And something in that, the collision of those two realities existing simultaneously in the same body, became the thing she couldn’t make small.

That’s when she first left him. Left the industry. Her first attempt at retirement.

And would you believe, the very man who had introduced her to this world, who had built a business on her body and banked every dollar of it, turned it all against her. In the custody battle that followed, he used her career as a weapon. Laid it out in court like evidence of her character. As if he hadn’t been the one holding the camera.

I’ve spent so much of my own adult life trying to make sense of men’s actions. Trying to find the logic in them. The kindness underneath. The good intention buried somewhere in the wreckage they leave.

I’m still trying. Especially now as a mother of boys.

But I don’t want to make this about the men. Elle certainly doesn’t. However, I can’t sit across from her and not feel the weight of them in the room. Not the violent ones, though some were that too. The subtler ones. The father whose greatest expression of love was confusion at his own daughter’s beauty. The boyfriend who heard her draw a line and took it as an invitation to step over it. The father of her child who filmed her, profited from her, and then handed the footage to a lawyer.

Not monsters. Just men moving through the world as men so often do, taking up all the space and calling it normal.

I just want a man to cherish me unconditionally, without wanting anything in return, she says.

Leaving wasn’t clean and it wasn’t quick. Walking away and committing fully to her coaching work, the money didn’t follow. Not immediately. Not even close. The woman who had commanded five figures for a weekend found herself unable to make rent. Rock bottom, she says, is an understatement.

She did the work. All of it. Narcissistic abuse survivor groups. Sharewell. Love Addicts Anonymous. SWOP, the Sex Workers Outreach Project. Layer by layer, the way you have to when you’ve spent years saying yes with your body while your soul was quietly screaming something else.

Saying yes when your body means no. That causes considerable damage on a cellular level, she tells me. Somatic damage. The kind that doesn’t show up on a scan but lives in the tissues, in the nervous system, in the gap between a moment of safety and your body’s inability to believe in it. Rebuilding trust, with herself, with intimacy, with men, has been the most important and most unglamorous work of her life. Learning to experience pleasure not as a performance for someone else’s consumption, but as something that belongs entirely and only to her.

Ayahuasca helped.

She sat with it once. What she saw, she says, was devastating and beautiful in equal form. She watched herself from above: her body curled in a fetal position on the floor, tubes radiating outward from her in every direction, each one carrying something away. Energy. Life force. Years of it. She was the source. And she had been leaking.

In that vision she understood something she hadn’t been able to reach through talking or therapy or prayer. That her connection to source wasn’t something outside her, not a deity, not a doctrine, not a practice she could buy or learn or earn. It was her. The thing she had been searching for in every room, every man, every transaction, every ceremony. She was the thing she had been looking for the whole time.

So, she came back from that and started building.

Now Elle holds space for women carrying the weight of their own unlived lives. Women who said yes too many times, who lost the thread of themselves so slowly they didn’t notice until they looked up one day and couldn’t find where they’d put it down. She shares the modalities that got her through her darkest days. The rituals that kept her tethered when nothing else could. And in doing so she has become the thing she most needed and never had.

A woman who stayed. On this earth. Because countless women in this industry have chosen to turn the lights off. On this life. And nobody wrote articles about them.

There’s a certain irony, a good one, in the fact that the escorting made her, without her ever realising it, into one of the most gifted listeners I’ve ever encountered. Sitting with lonely men, dying men, people living in the margins of their own stories, she had been practicing presence long before she had a name for it. Her first one on one coaching sessions must have felt less like a new career and more like a recognition.

Oh. This is what I was doing all along. This is what I was good at. She says.

Elle and I didn’t meet through any of this. We found each other in the female empowerment space, the versions of ourselves that exist on the other side of all our respective wreckage. We now run a monthly women’s circle together in the Tampa Bay area.

She read my debut novel TISSY in one sitting.

TISSY is the story of a woman slowly suffocating inside a marriage to a narcissist who decides, quietly and entirely alone, to become a sex worker. Not out of desperation. Out of hunger. For money, yes. But more than that, for a version of herself her husband never allowed to exist.

I felt at one with it, she told me the next morning. It reminded me of places I’d forgotten I had been. And made me feel okay about it.

That last part is what got me. Not the reading of it, not the staying up all night to finish it. The okay about it. Because okay isn’t forgiveness and it isn’t healing and it isn’t growth. It’s just the quiet radical act of not being at war with your own story anymore.

I ask her why she agreed to let me publish any of this. She doesn’t hesitate.

It’s the rage, she says. And I want to tell my story without shame.

There it is. The whole thing in two sentences.

TISSY isn’t Elle’s story. It isn’t mine either. But it was written in that same rage. And it lives in the same territory — the place where female desire meets survival, where wrong turns lead somewhere truer.

A yellow brick road.