The non-arrival of these long-awaited children could have been the issue that turned into a predicament that left a sour taste in the mouth – but it was not. Even after Spokes’s mother started sending young women to help Loveness take care of her five-roomed home in Mpopoma Township, Loveness knew herself to be the happiest and luckiest of women because Spokes always patiently sent the young women back to his mother, and made Loveness’s life feel full enough and complete as it was.

Her husband, exceptional man that he was, deserved only the best life, and she had promised to give him that on the day she married him in 1953. But now here was Daisy making him not see things clearly. Loveness reached for her writing pad and began a letter. It was time Spokes remembered that Daisy was more than a brutally murdered body that had been hacked to pieces and stuffed into a burlap sack. It was time he remembered that Daisy had given them the perfect gift.

Dikeledi

DIKELEDI

The two letters arrived at the time all letters arrived in the small village nestled in one of the many almost-forgotten corners of the world – early in the morning, having been delivered with the fresh bread from Downing’s Bakery, in the same truck that had journeyed all the way from the City of Kings. Of all the things that Dikeledi, the postman, loved about her job – and there were many – what she loved best was the warm, oven-baked smell of the envelopes and packages she delivered. She felt, in this way, that with each letter or present, she delivered the promise of the city. Dikeledi was not a romantic or poetic sort – far from it – but when it came to the post and its many possibilities, she allowed herself to acknowledge that some things in life could be perfect.

Only a handful of the letters that Dikeledi had delivered over the years had been addressed to the postman herself, and never in all her years as postman had she ever received two letters on the same day; so these letters heralded something new. The first letter, like all the other letters that had been addressed to Dikeledi Moyana, had been sent by the magnificent Molois – Spokes and Loveness. The second letter had not. Although she had never received a letter from this particular letter-writer before, Dikeledi recognised the handwriting immediately. It belonged to her husband – the man who had abandoned her fourteen years earlier. She knew that whatever news the letter carried, it would not bode well for her; it would tip the scales of her life towards imbalance. And so she looked at her name above the address for a long time, trying to decide whether or not to open it, or to let it become one of those unfortunate letters that gets lost in the mail.