Cobus felt the grass sweeping against his bare legs as he flowed silently through the savanna. He was one of a few Afrikaners who wore shorts instead of the standard-issue pants. It was an old Rhodesian bush warfare trick that let you feel the environment. To stay alive in the bush, you needed all your senses switched on.

The coffee was helping, but he was still hungover. The night before, he and Basani had shut down the local watering hole. As one drink led to two, then eight, he told her how he had signed up for the South African National Defense Force because he was looking for adventure, and then became a security contractor in Iraq because he wanted to do some good with his training. But Iraq was the jungle, and there is no good and evil in the jungle—or so he had willed himself to believe in order to justify the things he had seen and done there. In Fallujah, killing was a way of life. It was natural selection on a geopolitical scale. Though Cobus believed those statements to be true, the real truth was that over there, you could either emotionally process your experiences or be a good soldier, but you couldn’t do both. And it wasn’t until he returned to South Africa that the walls he had built to protect himself began to crumble.

“I feel like the war followed me here,” he told her. He feared that in some way, he had brought death to Kruger and it had found Oupa.

“Perhaps it is not war that is following you,” she said, “but the other way around.”

Her words caught Cobus off guard. He took a pull of his beer to buy a moment to think. “Maybe,” she continued, “you don’t think you deserve peace.”

“I just want to do some good,” he countered. “And the only skill I’ve got is doing evil.”

“You are a good man, Cobus.” Now it was Basani willing him to have hope. “You deserve peace. And love.”

Basani placed her hand on top of Cobus’s and stroked it gently. Cobus froze, uncertain how to react to the tender gesture.

As the bartender informed them it was last call, Basani had given him a look—the look. Her eyes lingered as she took him by the hand and led him to the door. Cobus’s heart pounded against his rib cage as they drove in silence down the inky black back roads.

He pulled to a stop at her home. She got out and stood beside the open door for a moment to see if he would be joining her. Cobus wanted desperately to go with her and share her bed, but he would wait. If it happened tonight on a drunken impulse, the morning would only bring her more turmoil. He would wait until her wounds healed, and then, perhaps, he might have the courage to act on his feelings for this unbreakable woman who saw hope for him—that is, if she would still have a cursed, violent man like him after the alcohol left her system.