In the first light of Kampala's morning, Yusufu Matovu stood at the window of his executive suite and watched the city stir below him. Corrugated roofs caught the sun at sharp angles. Streets filled quickly with voices and engines, commerce already in motion.
By any public measure, Yusufu was a success.
His name crowned a business empire that supplied the city with its bones — iron roofing, cement, paint, tiles. What had begun as raw ambition, lubricated by his father's connections as a former government minister, had matured into something reputable. Respectable.
He was welcome at every gala. Sought after in boardrooms. Workers nodded at him in recognition when he passed. The newspapers spoke of him as a man who had outlived his past.
But the past had never released him.
The call had come when he was in Arusha for a regional conference. A police officer on the line, his voice unsteady. An accident on Entebbe Road. His wife — luminous, brilliant, the centre of every room — had lost control of the car.
By the time Yusufu returned to Kampala, there was only twisted metal and silence.
The city mourned with him. Condolences arrived in waves. But grief hollowed him, leaving him moving through his days like a man rehearsing himself. The fire that had once driven him was gone.
Only his father remained — diminished now, a powerful mind undone by Parkinson's, confined to a private hospital. Sometimes the old man recognised Yusufu. More often, his gaze drifted past him, toward things long finished.
Thousands of miles away, Phoebe Mukasa sat with a battered photograph resting in her hands.
It showed a boy of seven standing at a bus stop in England, rain streaking the pavement, his small fingers curled tight. Simon.
The picture had been taken when his first foster mother, driven by his questions, had tried to trace his beginnings. The bus stop had surfaced in files and rumours, a place tethered to unanswered histories. Hoping memory might yield truth, she brought him there. Someone called the police. A photograph was taken.
That image had travelled quietly through years and hands before finally reaching Phoebe.
She had escaped men like Yusufu once — fled the networks that had owned her, renamed herself, rebuilt her life piece by piece. For a time, she had known something like peace. She married again. She believed she was safe.
That illusion had shattered too.
Now another battle unfolded inside her body. Breast cancer — taken on in silence, treated with grim resolve. She would not allow fear to rob her of the one thing left unresolved.
Simon had to know.
She pressed the photograph to her chest, steadying herself against the ache. She had loved her son every day she had lived. She would find him. She would tell him the truth — about the men who had taken her, the choices that had kept her alive, the cost of survival.
The cruelty of the world was not his alone to bear.
In Kampala, Yusufu walked the silent corridors of his home, ghosts rising with every step. The faces of those he had lost flickered through his mind — reminders of the man he had been, and the man he still was.
In the quiet, he prayed.
Not for absolution — but for one last chance.