He left at sixteen. He told himself he was coming back.
Thomas Gqiba boards a bus from the mountains of Matatiele and steps into the hungry machinery of Johannesburg - the hostels, the mines, the criminal networks that recruit ordinary men one small yes at a time. By twenty-one he has done something unforgivable. By twenty-eight, he has survived prison, found an unlikely love in a North West township, and built a life from the wreckage of the one he abandoned.
But the woman he left carries his son. And that son is now seventeen - the exact age Thomas was when he ran.
When his mother's dying pulls him home, Thomas must face two women who deserve more than he gave them, a son who became a man without him, and old feuds that never cooled.
Some debts can't be paid. They can only be carried - or put down for good.