Of course, I wanted no part of that then. If that’s what love could do to you—for I had to assume that they did love each other once—then I wanted nothing to do with it. Yet even while I rejected that kind of love, I still yearned for a great love, an exalted one that transcended earthly desires. Thus began my love affair with God and the church, which I stupidly thought would inoculate me against the messiness of human emotions.

It didn’t.

If anything, all it did was facilitate my ruin, for it was through the church that I fell in love with a priest, and it was that infatuation that was the catalyst for everything that came afterward. I thought at the time that I’d done a good job of hiding my feelings for him, but there was no hiding them from Ruth. She sniffed them out and tormented me relentlessly.

Ruth, the ruthless.

That’s how she was then and it’s how she still was. It was a quality, like her alcoholism, that she must have gotten from Da.

•   •   •

After our conversation about selling the farm, I knew I had to get out of the house or run the risk of throttling Ruth’s cosmetically enhanced neck. Besides, we needed supplies and she clearly wouldn’t be going shopping for anything more substantial than lemons for her gin and tonics.

Before I left for the shops, it took me ten minutes to build up the courage to call the ICU, and I let out a quavering breath when I was told Daniel’s condition remained critical and that nothing had changed. I tried to push away thoughts of him as I got into the car, fueling myself instead with anger and murderous thoughts directed at Ruth.

Though I’d driven the roads to the farm the night before, nothing looked familiar as I backtracked in the light of day. On the way to town, I passed a sprawling mass of shacks that stretched out as far as the eye could see. They covered acres of what used to be farmland. I’d kept up with South African news and knew it was one of the squatter camps that people euphemistically preferred to call “informal settlements.” Cities attracted thousands upon thousands of black laborers but had nowhere to house them, and so the camps were springing up all over the place.

I found a grocery store in town and after doing my shopping, I joined the long queues for the tills. My cart was half-full but other shoppers had two or three trolleys filled with nonperishable goods. I couldn’t understand why a weekday would be so busy and I asked the white cashier about it when I finally reached her. “What’s going on today? Some kind of sale or something I’m not aware of?”