Mma Ramotswe said nothing. At the other side of the room she saw Mma Makutsi watching, her large glasses catching the morning light from the windows.

She probed gently. “Something you are still doing? A bad thing?”

The woman moved her head so slightly that it would have been easy to miss the acknowledgement. “I did not think about it,” she said quietly. “I did not think about it at all. It just happened.”

Mma Makutsi leaned forward at her desk. It was difficult for her, with the client's chair facing Mma Ramotswe, and she always found herself addressing the back of the client's head, as she did now. But it gave her a certain advantage, she found, to speak from behind somebody; it was like interrogating a person under a strong light. Clovis Andersen disapproved of that, of course. Never use third-degree methods, he wrote. It does not get to the truth. What was this third degree? Mma Makutsi wondered. And what were the first and second degrees? Were they worse, or in some way better?

“You did not know what you were doing, Mma?” she prompted. “Or you did not know that what you did was bad?”

Mma Ramotswe gave Mma Makutsi a discouraging look.

“Mma Makutsi is just trying to help,” she said.

The woman looked anxiously over her shoulder. “I do not know, Mma,” she said. “I am not an educated woman.”

Mma Ramotswe spoke soothingly. “That is not important, Mma. There are many people who have not had an education who are very clever people indeed. It is not their fault that they have not been to school.”

“People laugh at people like me,” said the woman. “These days, when everybody is so educated.”

“If they laugh at you, then they are fools themselves,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Big fools.” She paused. “But, Mma, you must tell me what is making you unhappy. What is this thing?”

The woman looked up and met Mma Ramotswe's gaze. “I am a lady with two husbands,” she said. “That is me.”

There was a sound from the back of the room—a form of hissing from Mma Makutsi—an exhalation, really, not a hiss of disapproval. “Two husbands,” she muttered.

The woman sighed. “I do not approve of women who have two husbands,” she said. “But now I am one myself.”

Mma Ramotswe frowned. “It is against the law, you know, Mma, to get married twice. You do know that, don't you?”

The woman looked surprised. “Oh, I am not married,” she said. “These men are just boyfriends. But they are very good ones. They are like husbands. I call one my weekday husband and the other my weekend husband.”

Mma Ramotswe looked up at the ceiling. What could she do? People treated her like one of those agony aunts in the newspapers—they expected her to make their decisions for them. This woman was obviously troubled, but she did not see what she could do for her, other than advise her to give one boyfriend up. But presumably other people would have told her that, and she expected something more from her and Mma Makutsi.