Everything with the project was set in motion by a single phone call that I overheard one afternoon. A good friend of mine had spent years as a paid mistress but eventually escaped, rehabilitating herself into high society. I'd only known her in civilian life, so to speak, but one after-noon she received a panicked phone call from a woman she knew in her former life, and I had a glimpse of the other side…

There was an intimacy between the two women that was arresting, and a toughness to their conversation that filled me with questions. How can you to learn to open yourself back up to the world when closing yourself off is a means of survival? How do you reconcile something that dark in your past with hopes for a future? And can you ever take love on its own terms again, unbound from commerce?