There’s no money left to pay for a taxi home like she’d planned, so Zodwa will have to make the journey on foot. Considering her weakened state, she knows it will take much longer than the five hours it took to get here.

She takes the first staggering steps from the hut, squinting in the sunlight. Her senses heightened, Zodwa thinks she can hear the wildflowers and insects along the pathway speaking to her. The cosmos’s pink and white petals bob in the breeze, nodding their agreement with the ancestors that she is, indeed, a disappointment.

This, despite the fact that she tried so hard to do everything right: working diligently in class and studying by candlelight late into the night; giving a wide berth to the boys who congregated at street corners in packs; turning down offers of liquor and other distractions; being an obedient daughter and granddaughter; being a good friend.

A good friend.

Zodwa can no longer ward off thoughts of Thembeka, who she’s been avoiding since discovering her pregnancy. Thembeka: her best friend. Thembeka, whose boyfriend’s child Zodwa is now carrying. As difficult as breaking the news to her family will be, telling Thembeka will be infinitely worse.

The prophesied misery is already beginning.

CHAPTER FIVE

Delilah

25 April 1994

Goma, Zaire

My departure from Goma in Zaire was a noisy and frenetic affair as children surged around me, pulling me in to the current of their exuberance even as I tried to wrench myself free.

Michel latched on to my leg even as little Sonia begged to be picked up. Xavier, my colleague and closest friend at the orphanage, marched ahead of me, his rigid spine and brisk steps condemning me with everything he wouldn’t say. Wasn’t I the woman who’d told him just weeks before that she wouldn’t evacuate even if we were given those orders? And yet there I was, jumping ship without so much as a word of explanation.

Doctor was nowhere to be found. I’d searched everywhere for the child that morning so I could say a proper farewell. The boy, already no stranger to abandonment, had decided he wouldn’t give me the opportunity. I didn’t blame him. Even as I took my leave, I knew it was the worst possible time to go.

Considering what was happening across the border in Rwanda, my help at the orphanage was needed then more than ever before. The mass murder of the Tutsis was leaving thousands of their children orphaned, and the pervasive use of rape as a weapon of war by both the militia and Hutu civilians would create even more unwanted babies that would need to be taken care of. But staying was no longer an option.

When I’d called the Johannesburg General Hospital ICU after getting the letter about Daniel, the nurse who answered my inquiry came back with a question of her own. “Are you a family member?”