MINA NAWE

About this story

Naledi Xaba has spent two years putting herself back together, and the work shows. A psychologist she trusts. Medication that holds. A Saturday yoga class in the park that came with two friends she would now walk through fire for. She built all of it from the floor up and most days, it works. What she has not built is a way to walk into uPhuthu — the Parkhurst restaurant she and Siyabonga made out of his late aunt's recipes and his business degree — and not feel the whole marriage standing in the doorway. They are divorced. They still own it together. Their children eat supper in the back booth. Half the staff still call her Mrs Xaba because nobody has ever told them not to. Then she watches her ex-husband rest his hand on the shoulder of his chef in front of a full dining room, and two years of hard, honest work runs straight into something it never touched. She was the one who asked for the divorce. She has never told a living soul that. And she is nowhere near ready to work out which would cost her more: saying it out loud, or asking him to come home. A second-chance love story about the year a marriage quietly, and against all sense, started finding its way back.