When Ruth stood, I thought she was coming around to my side of the table to duck for cover, but instead, she turned toward the front of the house. I’d never seen such a look of fury on her face. Glass crunched under her heels as she marched toward the front door.

“Jesus, Ruth! What are you doing? Get away from there.”

But she wasn’t listening. She unlocked the door and yanked it open, waving her fist in the air as she screamed, “You fuckers are messing with the wrong women, do you hear me? You’re going to regret the day you were fucking born!”

An hour later, when the bubble of our conviviality had truly burst and we were cleaning up the debris, I returned us firmly back to earth by saying, “Think about what you’re doing, Ruth, wanting to bring an innocent child into this.” I gestured at the broken glass and the rocks. “Even if he were healthy, which he isn’t, it’s not safe here for him.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Ruth

27 December 1994

New Beginnings Baby Sanctuary, Rustenburg, South Africa

Dee’s words from Christmas Day are still chasing themselves around my mind when I sit down across from the social worker two days later.

Lindiwe has to repeat my name a few times before managing to pull me back into the present. “I don’t suppose you’d consider fostering another child? A healthy one?” Lindiwe asks.

“No. That’s not how it works,” I say. “It’s not like I came here wanting to foster a child and happened to find Mandla. It’s Mandla who found me and then led me here.”

Lindiwe nods. “I understand.”

“No, I don’t think you do,” I say.

I almost don’t understand it myself. How can I, when there’s no rational way to explain the attachment I have to Mandla? We spent less than two days together and honestly, what is that really? What’s forty-two hours when measured against a lifetime?

And yet, what it comes down to is that one minute I lived a life without any knowledge of him at all and then the next, there he was like magic; as if my desperate need had conjured him from a hat—abracadabra, sim sala bim—and made every dream I’d ever had come true. Of all the places he could have been left, it was on my doorstep that he turned up. That had to mean something.

Actually, it means everything.

“After a lot of soul searching,” I say to Lindiwe, “I realized there’s no decision to be made because it was never going to be a choice. Mandla belongs with me and that is that.” And it’s true. “Now, let’s finish the last of the paperwork so he can come home.”

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