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. These are the stories about what happens when that person walks back in. Twelve years after a single night on her parents' roof in Kimberley, a woman doing makeup at a Cape Town fashion show 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. A woman two years divorced still opens the restaurant with her ex-husband every morning, because nobody ever explained how to stop wanting a man you were the one to walk away from. A wife whose marriage runs on a schedule — fifteen minutes, three nights a week — meets the farm boy she dumped twelve years ago, who does not. What makes these harder than a first love story is that both people already know how it ends. They have the evidence. They did this before and it broke, and now they have to decide whether the thing that broke it was them or just the timing. Written by South African authors, set where you actually live — Kimberley, Cape Town, a restaurant that opens at six — with Black South African characters and original illustrations on every chapter. Chapter one is free.