“Lisa called me after her dinner date,” I tell Neil. “She was down. Told me her fiancé was going away for work.”
Neil’s taking notes again.
“She was hoping the dinner would be good for their relationship,” I continue. “But he clearly only did it to butter her up for the fact he would be away for a week. But I remember she sounded weirdly relieved, in a way.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, it was as if she was happy to have a fiancé at all.”
“So she was convincing herself,” Neil says. “Rationalising.”
“Exactly,” I say. “So I asked her why she felt like that. Why she needed to feel so grateful about having someone.”
“And?”
“She said she’d made mistakes in the past. Didn’t want to make them again.”
“What mistakes?”
I think back to Lisa’s voice, suddenly clear in my mind.
“She…”
I rack my brain for the thread that holds the story together. And then I find it.
Rachel—Lisa—was hesitant to talk about her past. It was almost as if she was ashamed. I was sitting on the small balcony of my shared apartment in Johannesburg, a glass filled to the brim with cheap red wine. I remember lots of calls on that balcony, sipping away at my wine and listening to the never-ending drone of the traffic in the background.
“I had a boyfriend before,” Lisa told me. I settled in as though I was listening to an audiobook, smoking one cigarette after the other.
“He was… beautiful.”
She emphasised the last word almost wistfully.
“How did you meet?” I asked.
“At school.”
“And you loved him?”
“So much,” she said in a whisper. Then silence. She was quiet for so long that I thought she’d changed her mind about telling me. But she found her voice again.
“We dated for three years. Our friends got along, and our families too. It’s necessary, you know what I mean?”
I nodded. “So, it was important that your family approved?”
“Not just mine. His too. It was kind of like a courtship.”
“What happened?” I said, taking a drag of my cigarette.
“Daniel—that’s his name—well, we spent summers together. We spent most of our free time together. We were inseparable. Like those couples who had a joint Facebook account, but in real life.”
I frowned. Did people really think a love like that was healthy?
“One day, we had a fight. Just a fight,” she said, her tone changing.
“About what?”
“He’d spoken to his mates. Something about freedom, about needing to spread his wings. Or something. It was crazy. He was free. I never held him back.”
Lisa’s voice became more animated as she flicked through her memories. I had to remind myself that I was her counsellor, not a friend ready to gossip with her. “And then?”
“There was a wedding. Daniel’s cousin’s wedding. He was a few years older than us, but we moved in the same circles,” she said glumly. “We agreed to go together. I was his plus one. I was his girlfriend. And I bought a red dress.”
Something in my stomach felt uneasy. “And did you go?”
“Of course.”
Silence. I checked my phone, wondering if we’d been cut off. But then her voice came through again.
“He embarrassed me. I showed up, and when I got there he just…”
She stopped talking. Her soft sobs echoed across the phone.
My words were a whisper. “This must be painful. I can hear how hurt you are.”
Her voice was brittle. “After that, I just… faded. I couldn’t function. My mother told me it would hurt, but it hurt too much. And the guilt of it—I couldn’t.”
“Where is the guilt coming from?” I asked.
“I let my family down.”
“How?”
Lisa’s words came out almost robotically. “Because it was humiliating. For all of us.”
“And that’s where she stopped,” I tell Neil.
He sits back. “She didn’t say anything else?”
I shake my head. “She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She said the breakup disappointed her family. But I remember thinking that didn’t sound right. Families are supposed to support you, not bring you down, right?”
“You got that on a post-it note somewhere?” he says, eyebrows raised.
“All I’m saying is it sounds wrong.”
A few beats pass, and then Neil perks up. “Hold on.”
He takes his laptop from the drawer, flips it open on the table. We sit in silence as he taps away at the keypad. He turns the laptop around to show me a document. I start reading from the top. As I read the lines, my unease grows.
“Like she told you, her ex’s name is Daniel,” Neil says.
I say nothing, my mind racing as the words swim in front of me.
“And the cousin she talked about is Samuel. It was his wedding she was telling you about. And this,” he taps the laptop, indicating the document on the screen, “Was filed a week later.”
I lean back. “So this is—”
“A restraining order.”
I blink once, then twice. “But why? How?”
Neil looks at me as if I’m stupid. “She was stalking him. After Daniel ended things with her, she kept showing up wherever he went. His cousin’s wedding included.”
My mind goes back to that phone call. I remember the tone of Lisa’s voice. Fragile. Robotic. I shake my head. “Maybe it was a bad breakup, but a restraining order? That’s bordering on—”
“Stalker behaviour. Instability.”
Neil and I stare at each other. “She would have told me,” I say.
“She told you what she wanted to believe. What put her in a better light.”
I open my mouth to speak, then close it again.
“If you ask me,” Neil says, spinning the laptop back towards him, “Lisa had some secrets she didn’t tell anyone. Not even you.”