Chapter 7 - The Morning After

CHAPTER 7: THE MORNING AFTER

She woke alone to winter sunlight and the smell of him on her skin.

A note on the pillow, block capitals, an engineer's handwriting: GONE FOR AMAGWINYA. DON'T MOVE. — K.

She smiled. Stretched. Ached in the ways worth aching.

The watch lay on the nightstand where the light had found it. She picked it up without thinking — the way you pick up a man's things when he's not looking, learning him by his objects. Old steel. Worn leather. Heavier than it looked.

She turned it over.

The engraving was small and official, the kind done by a jeweller's machine:

TŠELISO MOKOENA
25 YEARS OF SERVICE
IMPALA PLATINUM

The room went very quiet. Even the fridge.

Her father's name. In her hands. In this man's bedroom, in this town, on the nightstand where it had watched them all night —

She looked up.

And daylight did what the lamp had refused to do. The shelf across the room, the one that had stood in shadow: framed photographs. In the middle one, a man in his fifties, grey at the temples, with her own eyes set in his face — one hand resting proud on the shoulder of a tall teenage boy in a graduation gown.

Papa.

And Khotso.

It came fast after that. The first message — she scrolled back with shaking hands — sent on the fourteenth of June. Papa's anniversary. A gift from someone I owe. I once loved people I wasn't allowed to. The kitchen changing pressure at her father's name. The word he'd buried in her neck at the very end, the one she'd let the wave wash away: ntšoarele. Forgive me.

And the mutual friend. The one she'd never checked.

She tapped it now.