Debbie van Wyk has spent more than thirty years becoming the woman who knows where everything is. She started as a junior accounts clerk straight out of school, discovered that she was considerably better with numbers and difficult colleagues than she had expected, and slowly worked her way into payroll management without ever becoming particularly ambitious about titles. She likes competence more than status. Her desk is organised, her deadlines are met, and if three hundred employees expect to be paid on Friday, Debbie is the woman making certain that they are.

She married in her twenties and raised two children while working full time. The marriage lasted twenty-four years before ending without spectacular betrayal or catastrophe. They simply became two people managing the same household. Her former husband remarried several years later. Their children are adults with lives of their own. Debbie tells everyone that the arrangement suits her perfectly, and much of the time it genuinely does.

She owns a comfortable townhouse in a gated complex in Johannesburg North and has shaped her life around routines she controls. Coffee before traffic. Work by eight. Groceries on Thursday. Hair appointment every fifth Saturday. Wine on the patio when the weather behaves. She is financially stable, socially capable, and surrounded by colleagues who like her. What she lacks is anybody who sees her after all the useful parts of the day are finished.

Debbie has not become a tragic lonely divorcee. She would despise the description. She laughs loudly, attends work functions, dresses up when pushed, and can flirt when she feels safe enough. She simply stopped expecting anything significant to happen in her private life. At fifty-five she regards herself as attractive in a practical, slightly defensive way: still good-looking, still very noticeably built, but old enough that she assumes most attention has an explanation attached to it.

That assumption begins to weaken on the night she locks herself out.