Chapter 9 - Chapter Seven — Naz

"So let me get this straight," Lonwabo says, leaning against the rail and looking out over the water of the Zanzibar channel, so blue it doesn't look like a real colour. "You meet this woman Chandré... what? Twice? And somehow you talk Naledi into inviting her onto Sabelo's birthday charter as your plus one, but you never actually asked Chandré to be your plus one?"

"That's about right, ja." I lean on the rail too, between him and Given Modise, my agent's husband.

"I like it," Lonwabo's brother Given says, crunching ice between his teeth and swirling the drink in his glass.

"You would," Lonwabo shoots back.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Given frowns.

"You're intense, that's what it means," I offer wryly, not sure how I feel about being compared to a man the whole league calls a shark. "Especially about Nqo and your daughter."

"I think that's what they call being a family man," Given defends himself.

"Or a sociopath," Lonwabo counters. "I've heard both."

Two brothers couldn't be more different. Technically they're stepbrothers, which accounts for the fact that they look nothing alike — Lonwabo with the loose curls and the golden-brown skin, set against Given, who is a good few shades darker, shaved down to the scalp and built like the door of a Sandton nightclub. It's the difference in temperament that's most striking, though. Lonwabo is a vicious competitor on the pitch. He has to be — he took the armband at Southmere when Sabelo retired — but off it he's patient, and he has a well-earned reputation as one of the nicest men in the league.