Three weeks in Batam. Twenty-one days without malls, without aromatherapy-scented central air conditioning, and without the touch of a man.
My life shrank into a monotonous grind, each day blurring into the next with the same exhaustion. I woke up every day at five a.m. The water heater in Raphael’s official residence was usually broken, so I shivered through cold showers. Then I’d head out, pushing through the red dust haze toward the shipyard. There, I sat on a hard plastic chair for eight hours, copying thousands of material codes from crumpled invoices into a ledger, all while listening to the deafening clang of sledgehammers striking steel.
My hands, which used to hold nothing heavier than a glass of wine and a credit card, were now calloused on the middle finger and thumb from grip
