Mma Potokwane hesitated before she gave her reply. “If that’s what you want, Mma, then … then I’ll do it.”

“Good,” said Mma Ramotswe.

“Yes,” said Mma Makutsi firmly. “Good.”

They sat in silence after that. Later, though, shortly before they retired to bed in Mma Potokwane’s large sleeping hut, shared with two young Potokwane nieces who had been helping in the fields, Mma Ramotswe whispered to Mma Makutsi, “She’s still not herself, Mma. She says she hasn’t given up, but I think she has.”

Mma Makutsi was dismayed to hear this; she had been more optimistic. “But she said that she’s coming back. She said that …”

“People say things,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But when they’re in that frame of mind, they don’t mean them. The lips say one thing, the heart says another. Or says nothing.”

The lips say one thing, the heart says another. Those words echoed in Mma Makutsi’s mind as she drifted off to sleep that night. Outside, in the night, a dog barked at some shadow, some creature in the night. The lips say one thing, the heart says another. She wondered whether that was true, or whether it just sounded true. And what did it mean to say that the heart said nothing? Were there people whose heart really did say nothing? And if there were, who exactly were they? The dog gave another bark, followed by a yelp. Then there was silence. She opened her eyes in the darkness. Nothing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A LAWYER SPILLS TEA OVER HIS SHIRT

THEY RETURNED THE next day, a Saturday, arriving back in Gaborone in the middle of the afternoon. On Sunday Mma Ramotswe went to church at the Anglican Cathedral, as she always did, and helped with the tea afterwards, an opportunity for people to chat, to inspect at closer quarters what others were wearing, and to discuss—and if necessary criticise—the day’s sermon. One of the members of the congregation, an Indian accountant from Kerala who had lived in Botswana for twenty years or so, was going home to India for a daughter’s wedding. He told Mma Ramotswe about the wedding plans, which involved, he revealed with a modicum of pride, several hundred people travelling from all over India, all wanting hotels and feasts and special treatment. She listened to this with sympathy—weddings were rarely simple, and Indian weddings, it seemed to her, were even more complicated and fraught with difficulty than their Botswana counterparts—but she was not really concentrating. Nor did she pay attention when Bishop Mwamba himself came up to speak to her and told her about a book he had been reading that he thought she might enjoy, if she had the time.

“But I know how busy you are, Mma Ramotswe,” the Bishop said, “what with your business and all those investigations, and so on.”