GOOD GIRL

About this story

Precious Ndlela is twenty-one, working two jobs, and living in the cottage behind her mother's house in Westville. When her ex-boyfriend disappears owing her fourteen thousand rand, she drives up to Umhlanga to ask his estranged father for the money — and walks into an interview she never applied for. Musa Mthembu is forty, immaculate, and mistakes her entirely. By the time the misunderstanding is cleared up she has already been on her knees on his office carpet, and she has already found out something about herself she cannot un-know. He offers her a job. She takes it. Neither of them says out loud what they are actually agreeing to, and neither of them mentions the small matter of whose son she used to belong to. What follows is three months of an arrangement with rules, in a city where everybody knows everybody, and a young woman discovering that the thing she has been starving for was never money at all.