She was going to call time on her duel with Kagiso. She’d let it define who she was. Now she would shape the rest of her life – whatever happened – on her own terms. It had never been about wooing him back, not for some years now. She’d given up on that a long time ago. One evening in Cape Town, one night in Muizenberg, and a journey across the vastness of the Karoo, that was all it had been. There hadn’t been much of a relationship to start with. That was what she had told herself for years. Just an affair, a fling, a mistake. God knew she’d made enough of those when it came to men. She’d always been able to walk away unscathed. Not with Kagiso, though. She’d never stopped long enough to work out why. It was different now: she’d had plenty of time to think.

Just a few days ago she was still up for the fight. Ready to run, to hide, to lie, to do whatever it took to stay a step ahead of the authorities. That was why she’d got rid of the car, a link to her movements in Mpumalanga. She was ready to tough it out. Then came all those news bulletins about a radical priest (she knew him by reputation) who’d died in a mysterious car accident and the hunt for what the police had called the ring-leader of an underground cell of activists.

They, Willemse and his mob, were picking off their enemies one by one. Lesedi’s death gave them a free hand. It was the ideal cover to silence their critics. She began to imagine a headline: ‘Lesedi Murder Ring-leader Killed In Police Operation’.

She wouldn’t put it past them. That was when she’d known she had to make a choice: come clean or wait to hear that Kagiso had paid the price for her silence. That was when she’d discovered she hadn’t expunged the curse of intimacy. With the other men in her life she’d been looking for something. In Kagiso she had found something.

It was eight in the morning. They drove into Johannesburg earlier than they’d planned to, Lindi and Khethiwe, with the driver in the front cab and Kagiso lying low in the back of the windowless van. The road heading west was quiet, and most of the checkpoints were on the other side of the road, for traffic heading towards the Mozambique border. On the one occasion they’d been stopped, just outside Machadodorp, Ma Khethiwe had scolded the soldier. Vaguely pointing to the back of the van she’d said she had supplies for her spaza shop in Benoni: was he going to pay her for lost earnings when she did not turn up on time for customers?