The nearness of the vile and corrupting Cornelius Findlay had sickened her. The knowledge of who her real father was – a man only sixteen years her senior – had sickened her. The realisation of what her mother had done had sickened her.

Saskia, long at sea, had become completely unmoored by the truth, which turned her life into an emotional whirlpool that landed her in Ingutsheni. Through all the madness, however, she had been sane enough to devise a plan. Cornelius Findlay was dead, her mother was too far gone, and so Emil Coetzee would have to pay the heaviest price for what had happened to her.

As Saskia struggled back into her clothes and stumbled away from a still shocked Clement Rutherford, she realised that she had become Cornelius Findlay’s perfect creation – a person deformed and distorted by their need for revenge. She had meant to lure Emil Coetzee with the promise of writing a very flattering biography, had thought he would not be able to resist the idea of being immortalised and idolised by an attractive, sexually available woman. One father had violated her; why not another? Emil Coetzee was a man whose appetites and proclivities were well known. This, getting him to sleep with her, had been the surest way she knew of destroying him. She had not just wanted to tell him the truth; she had wanted to make him complicit in every bad thing that had happened to her beyond her conception. Since they had never shared in each other’s lives, she had wanted them to share in each other’s hurt and pain and humiliation – to be bound together by something even stronger than biology: shame.

When, six months after her hospitalisation, Saskia had been deemed well enough to reintegrate into society, her wimp of a husband, Norman Hargrave, found the courage to ask her for a divorce as soon as she returned home. Saskia did not love Norman. She never had. She had married him only because he had asked her to marry him. But she did not want him to leave her, either. It was a matter of pride. It was a matter of survival. It was a matter of … normalcy. If their marriage failed, it would mean that she had failed at building a normal, adult life, and then what would have been the point of all that suffering?