SHE ANSWERED THE WRONG CALL

About this story

Every love story has a hinge — the small mechanism the whole door swings on. In this one it's a telephone number, recycled by the network and sitting one digit off a bird rescue in a Free State dorpie. He calls looking for raptors; he finds a teacher who fosters everything the world has dropped. He is grumpy, guarded, and raising his daughter two doors down from his parents because the city took enough from them both. She is warm, stubborn, and constitutionally incapable of leaving a hurt thing alone — including, eventually, him. Between them stands a seven-year-old who understands the plot before either adult does, and a juvenile black-shouldered kite who will not be kept but chooses, in the end, to come back. Nobody in this book falls in love in a straight line. There is a lie told at a front desk, an apology accepted too quickly, and a first kiss in a bakkie that was never part of the plan for the evening. The question is never whether these people belong together. It is whether the man who stopped expecting good things will notice one standing in front of him, holding a bird, waiting. He does. It takes him one wrong call, one right woman, and a bird with excellent timing.