Second chance romance: the one who got away, back in the room

Everybody has one. The person it did not work out with, for reasons that made sense at the time and make less sense every year since.

This shelf has a position, and it is worth stating before the stories: everyone deserves a second chance. Everyone. Not everyone gets one, and not every second chance is taken — but the deserving is not in question here, and no story on this page is built to punish somebody for the thing they got wrong the first time.

It is more common than you think

Not the reunion — the wondering. Almost everybody is carrying one of these, and almost nobody says so, because saying so out loud sounds like ingratitude for the life you actually built.

So these stories are not fantasies about escaping a life. They are about the specific, ordinary situation of being a whole adult with a job and a schedule and possibly a husband, and running into the one person your body remembers before your face has finished deciding what to do.

Twelve years and a rooftop

The Second Take, by Zakes Mdluli, is the one most readers should start with.

Chandré Cupido was eighteen and spent one night on her parents' roof in Kimberley with the quietest boy on the team. The next day he inherited everything her family had been promised. Twelve years later she is doing makeup at a Cape Town fashion show and finds herself face-first against the chest of a footballer who has been watching her career from nine thousand kilometres away and never once picked up the phone.

Twenty-six chapters. What makes it work is that his silence is not excused — she makes him account for it, and he has to.

The marriage that never actually ended

Mina Nawe is the longest story here and the truest.

Naledi and Siyabonga Xaba have been divorced two years. They still share two children and the Parkhurst restaurant they built out of a notebook of handwritten recipes, so she still opens up with him every morning. Nobody ever explained to her how to stop wanting a man she was the one to walk away from.

Forty-six chapters, and the thing they have to do to find their way back is not a grand gesture. It is grieving out loud — the thing neither of them could manage when it mattered.

Twenty years, in front of an audience

Ubuyile puts the conversation somewhere neither of them can leave.

Luvuyo Mgudlwa is the war correspondent the country trusts with its worst news. Nolwazi Mabaso is the face it wakes up to every morning. Twenty years after one kiss at a party, they are put on a stage at Fort Hare and told to interview each other, with a big screen behind them and a few hundred students in front. The girl he raised at a distance is being capped the same weekend, and she has not forgiven him for the twenty years.

Twelve chapters, and the gentlest thing on this shelf.

Fifteen minutes, three nights a week

The Farmer's Seed is three chapters and the sharpest.

Nqobile's marriage runs on a schedule. Fifteen minutes, three nights a week, and everybody involved has agreed to call that fine. Then a farmers'-market reunion with the boy she dumped twelve years ago, who does not run on a schedule, ruins the timetable permanently.

It is the shortest way onto this shelf and the one most likely to be recognised.

What makes these harder than a first love story

Both people already know how it ends. They have the evidence. They did this once and it broke, and now they have to work out whether the thing that broke it was them or just the timing — which is a genuinely different question and the only one that matters.

That is also why the shelf can hold its position without being soft about it. Deserving a second chance and being handed one are not the same thing. In every story here somebody has to say the true thing out loud first, and in two of them it takes most of the book.

Written by South African authors, set where you actually live — Kimberley, Cape Town, a Parkhurst restaurant that opens at six, a Fort Hare hall — with Black South African characters and original illustrations on every chapter.

If you want the version where they never got the first chance at all, that is Slow Burn Romance. If you want the version where somebody is already married, that is Cheating & Affairs.

Start free

Chapter one of every story is free — no login, no card. Start with The Farmer's Seed for the short version, The Second Take for the proper one, and Mina Nawe when you want to live with them a while.