Chapter 48 - Chapter 48: What I Came To Say

Vuyi gives my mother two middle fingers on the pavement below, and I can't help the sickeningly satisfied smile I'm wearing as I watch it from up here, out my penthouse windows.

I'm far too obsessed with that wild girl, and it's hard to explain the swell in my chest from knowing she still has my back, regardless that she's not ready to talk to me yet.

But that sense of pride shifts to panic soon enough when I watch my mother turn, cross Jellicoe Avenue and disappear below me into the lobby of my own building.

I've been thinking about this for days, saying the words over in my head until they stopped meaning anything. But however ready I felt when I booked her a FlySafair seat, or put two nights at the Southern Sun ten minutes up the road on my card, right now every bit of that preparation has gone out the window.

Thobeka tracked down her number last week, and all morning my thumb has been hovering over that contact, wanting to cancel. Panic has been running through me. Anger too. But I couldn't cancel. I've needed to face this woman since I was sixteen, and it wasn't until now, when I understood that my past with her was holding my future hostage, that it turned into something urgent.