Em Gessen

Sometimes you can tell when a person is used to living in a different kind of space.

The furniture was a bit too large.

Priscilla herself looked out of place.

She's very tall and, well, she's stunning.

Whenever I've heard people try to describe her, the word regal comes up.

When she walks down the street, people literally turn around to look.

She demanded more room and more light and an audience larger than me and my recording equipment on the couch.

Priscilla was 42 at the time of this conversation.

She comes from a prominent family in Zimbabwe.

Her father was a neighbor of the country's longtime dictator, Robert Mugabe.

Priscilla had worked as a fashion model.

She didn't expect to be a single mother with two kids living in semi-hiding in a house with brown carpeting and a refrigerator with a death rattle.

Talking to me now, she was still trying to absorb that this was how her fairytale international romance ended.

Me?

I was trying to puzzle out how it had begun.

So here I was, at Priscilla's safe house, while the kids were at school, asking her to start at the beginning.

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I am Em Gessen, and this is The Idiot.

I began with the story's first mystery.

This was 2011, at a party in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.

Alan was there in business, scoping out investment opportunities for the Ukrainian oligarch.