Mma Ramotswe bit her lip, suppressing a smile. For a moment she imagined an early woman, hirsute, half standing, half crouching, but wearing a large pair of glasses, like Mma Makutsi’s. She took a hand off the wheel and reached out to touch him gently on the shoulder. Then he took her hand and held it briefly, before she put it back on the wheel so that the tiny white van might not go off the road again.

“Or maybe she was called Mma Ramotswe,” Puso said.

NOW, sitting with Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni on the verandah, she looked out into the dark of her garden. The light from the three-quarters moon was enough to reveal the shape of the shrubs, the outline of the mopipi tree, the flat umbrella of the acacia at the far end of her plot. By day her garden tended to reproach her, her eye always being drawn to the places where more watering was needed to keep things from wilting, or to those where the plants had withered and died; at night the bare patches were obscured, and forgiven.

“I had a letter today,” she said.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni inclined his head. “A letter?”

“Not a nice one.”

She told him of the contents, and he listened in silence. His voice was grave when he spoke. “That is just what I have been worried about, Mma Ramotswe. It’s what I’ve been fearing for a long time. Right from the beginning.”

“You’ve been worried that I would receive a letter like that?”

He shook his head. “No. No. I have been worried that sooner or later you would come up against some really wicked person—some dangerous person who would try to harm you. Now you have.”

She reached out to put a reassuring hand on his arm. She knew that he was given to fretting about all sorts of things: about the garage, about the apprentices, about the state of the world; and she knew, too, that this was exactly what Dr. Moffat had warned about. When Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had recovered from his depressive illness, Dr. Moffat had said that he should avoid too much anxiety. “You can’t take away all of life’s cares,” the doctor had said. “But you can at least make sure that he doesn’t worry too much. If he worries too much, the illness could return.”

I should not have told him about the letter, she thought. There was no point in burdening him with it when there was nothing that he could do about it and it would simply prey on his mind. But it was too late now; she had told him the exact contents of the letter and she could hardly take it back. Or could she?