COMFORTING THE WIDOWER

About this story

The most dangerous kind of want is the patient kind. COMFORTING THE WIDOWER is a slow-burn with a filthy back half: a young woman from the Transkei, raised into a Bryanston household by a benefactor twenty years her senior, and the year of grief that turns duty into something neither of them can name. It starts with a nightmare and a hand held in the dark. It escalates through two weeks of perfectly aimed small provocations — a hip at the sink, feet on the couch, a hand held too long at the movies — before the lights come up and the pretence comes down. The payoff is a full night neither will forget, an honest conversation neither expected, and one door left open that promises a reckoning still to come. Tender, explicit and quietly heartbreaking, with a coda that will make you sit up. Three chapters. Bring tissues for two reasons.