I mean, I knew what I was getting into, working at an old age home. If you work with the elderly, death is something you must cope with. It’s something you expect. And besides, I’ve gone through this already with my own grandmother passing. I know all about the sadness and the sense of loss and the emptiness in our house afterwards.

At my first interview, Matron Mannathoko discussed it. “You are young, Leah. If you think death will be too difficult to deal with, you must tell me now. It affects us all of course, though we take comfort knowing we made their final days happier.”

“I will be fine, ma’am,” I told her. I thought at the time that this was true.

But it wasn’t; it isn’t! There in the sunroom, when I hear that Mr July has passed, I burst into tears. Instantly. I can’t stop crying, right there in front of everyone. I feel awful because I know that all this past weekend he was calling for Charlotte. And I wasn’t there to comfort him or hug him. My tears flow like a flood.

In the end, Matron sends me home. Sister Thembeka rides with me in the taxi all the way, her arm round my shoulder while I sob on and on. She is the one who explains things to my worried mother.

I can’t speak. I am still crying.

“That’s it, Leah!” my mother decides. “You are not going back to Oak Ridge! That’s not the place for you, dear. I’ll ask my boss if you can come work at Kgosi’s Furnishings. We need a filing clerk, I think.”

Two days later I start work at the furniture factory as a filing clerk. I photocopy endless receipts and invoices. I punch holes in endless sheets of paper. Endlessly I open and close dusty files and even dustier filing-cabinet shelves.

“She’s doing a fine job,” Mr Kgosi tells my mother.

And Bontie says, “Good move, Leah. That’s a more promising place. There’s bound to be some talent with all that furniture getting built and sold. See if you can rustle up some guys for this weekend. Some sexy studs! It’s about time you started working on the dating front, instead of always leaving it to me.”

But most of the people down my office passage are either female, or middle-aged men.

“No talent here,” I tell Bontie. “Nothing but endless piles of boring paper that I shuffle around for eight hours each day.”

And then Zack appears. He is a stud in anyone’s book!

I look up from where I am kneeling at the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and there he is: tall and strong-looking, confident and at ease, with a little-boy smile and the most amazing eyes. I mean, the most stunning eyes I have ever seen, especially now they’re looking down on me.

“You must be Leah,” he says. Sexy voice. Naturally sexy, not trying-hard-to-be sexy. “At last, someone young and beautiful in this dump!”

I can’t think of an answer to that. Even if I could think of an answer, I probably wouldn’t be able to say it out loud. My breath seems to have stopped half-way to my throat. My mouth feels paralysed. Tongue-tied. Isn’t that the word for it?

“I’m Zack, by the way.”

And then he disappears. It’s almost as if night has suddenly fallen and all the light has gone out of the world.