A change had come over her, and Dikeledi deeply suspected that her metamorphosis had something to do with the magnificent Molois and the firm belief they both had in this thing called love. They found love in each other, and in the books they read, and they seemed eager to let it beam onto the few people they allowed into their sphere. Dikeledi, who had never sought love, and, therefore, had never found it, was one such person for the Molois. They loved her with the love that they would have given the children they had always longed for but had never had. They loved her in a way that made Dikeledi question the workings of a god who would make the Molois, who were so very deserving of a child’s love and happiness, childless. Now that Dikeledi was beginning to understand the workings of love, she realised that the magnificent Molois had always found many ways to love her. At present, they were loving her by allowing her into their intimate reading circle, in which they were currently reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Try though she might, Dikeledi could not help but be wary of the make-believe love that the pretend people in books felt.

‘She shoots him because she loves him,’ Loveness said as they both used silver cookie cutters to cut mounds of soft, cottony dough into perfectly round scones.

‘No. She shoots him because he has rabies,’ Dikeledi said sensibly.

Loveness laughed indulgently before saying, ‘And if that is not an act of love, then what is?’

Dikeledi frowned at this reasoning before asking, ‘What else can you do with a rabid person, besides kill him?’

‘You can leave him to die a painful death … leave him to suffer through something that he cannot even comprehend,’ Loveness said. ‘The entire book is a call to love: love of oneself, love of another.’ Loveness stole a glance at Dikeledi before she continued, ‘It shows that you need to love yourself enough to wait for the right person to come along.’

As Dikeledi watched Loveness contentedly grease four baking trays, she realised that it was easy for Loveness and Spokes to believe in love because they had found it in each other; but not everyone was so fortunate. While she was aware that Spokes and Loveness had waited for each other to come along, she was mistrustful of the logic of making this a universal expectation and decree, but even with all her suspicions and misgivings about love, Dikeledi had to admit that she was beginning to see something that could only be called love at play in her life.