Chapter 7: Leave That To Me

Marriage suited them.

This was Mali’s considered assessment at the end of the first month, rendered with the same methodical honesty she applied to the household accounts. The compound ran beautifully. Pieter’s trading business was expanding in the careful deliberate way of a man who built things to last rather than to impress. Their evenings on the veranda had lost none of their quality — if anything the conversations had deepened, the silences between them grown more comfortable, the particular intimacy of two people who had chosen each other settling into the walls of the place like warmth settling into stone.

She was happy. She examined this periodically and confirmed it each time without reservation.

There was, however, the other matter.

Pieter de la Cort was, as Mali had understood from the orchid shrine onward, a man of considerable appetite.

She had not been surprised by this. She had read it in him clearly and had factored it into her assessment the way she factored everything — honestly, without illusion. What she had perhaps underestimated, in the way that theory always underestimates practice, was the specific frequency and enthusiasm with which that appetite presented itself.

He was not demanding. She wanted to be precise about this in her own mind. He never pushed, never made her feel obligated, never allowed his hunger to become her burden. He asked — always, because that was simply who he was — and she said yes because she loved him and because her body had its own opinion about Pieter de la Cort that was not entirely aligned with her sense of comfortable frequency.

But there were mornings when she heard him moving in the kitchen before dawn and knew he had been awake for an hour already and understood why, and felt, alongside her genuine love for him, the quiet exhaustion of a woman who had given everything she had and was aware it was not quite everything he needed.

She did not resent him for it. That was important and she was clear about it. His nature was his nature, the same nature that had stopped walking in that courtyard and come back across it and bought a ring on Tuesday. She would not want him different.

She simply needed to think.

The thinking took several weeks.

Mali was not a woman who rushed conclusions. She turned the matter over in the quiet hours — the early mornings at her accounts desk, the market walks, the moments between sleep and waking when the mind moved freely and without the management she usually applied to it.