Aunt Marina picks up teenage Amor from her boarding school and delivers the news that her mother Rachel has died.

Hiding outside the house, Amor recalls overhearing her dying mother ask Manie to give their Black maid Salome ownership of her house.

When Amor and Anton raise the promise about Salome's house at a family gathering, Manie flatly denies ever making it and storms out.

As Anton approaches the gate of his military unit's camp to return, he abruptly abandons his post and hitchhikes away in civilian clothes.

Manie dies after a snake bites him during a church fundraiser where he attempted to break the world record inside a snake tank.

Amor returns to South Africa from London and discovers that Reverend Simmers has built a large church on Swart family land.

To claim his share of Manie's inheritance, Anton visits Simmers's house and delivers a fast, grudging apology he does not mean.

After years of stalling, Anton tells Amor he will make a plan about Salome's house, and Amor rides away on the bus feeling at peace.

Astrid calls Amor to boast about attending President Mbeki's inauguration; Amor responds coldly, seeing Mbeki as the man ignoring the AIDS crisis.

A professional carjacker forces Astrid into the trunk of her car, drives to an abandoned drive-in theater, and kills her.

Amor returns to the Swart farm for Astrid's funeral and presses Anton once again about the long-unfulfilled promise to Salome.

With the power out, Anton drunkenly wanders through the farmhouse on Reconciliation Day, unable to find meaning or purpose in his life.

After taking his father's gun outside to investigate a noise, Anton shoots himself dead in a field behind the Swart home.

Amor visits the family lawyer Cherise and arranges to give away all of her uncollected inheritance payments from her father's estate.

Amor presents Salome with the deed to her house, but Salome's son Lukas dismisses the gesture as worthless and decades too late.

In 1986, the Swart matriarch Rachel dies after making her husband Manie promise to give their Black maid Salome ownership of the house she lives in, a promise Manie immediately denies ever making. The family fractures over this betrayal, with eldest son Anton eventually deserting the military rather than return to a life he can no longer stomach. Manie dies years later in a grotesque fundraising stunt orchestrated by his manipulative minister Simmers, and his three children inherit the farm along with the unresolved promise. The middle sibling Astrid is murdered by a carjacker a decade later, each death bringing the remaining family together only for them to once again fail to honor Rachel's original wish. Youngest sibling Amor, who has carried the moral weight of the unfulfilled promise her entire life, returns home after Anton's suicide determined to finally act. She transfers ownership of Salome's house and surrenders her inheritance, only for Salome's son Lukas to tell her the gesture has arrived far too late to mean very much.

The Swart family's broken promises and slow decline across four decades.

Salome is barred from attending Rachel's funeral because the church is segregated for white people only.

Excluded from the funeral, Salome puts on her best clothes at home and says a private prayer for Rachel's spirit.

Anton privately tells Amor that apartheid law would actually prevent their father from legally transferring the property to Salome anyway.

Breaking his promise to Amor, Manie sends her back to the boarding school she dreads just days after Rachel's funeral.

On the way home from the funeral home, Astrid confides to Amor that she has been having an affair with Jake Moody.

The family lawyer reads Manie's will aloud; Amor asks about Salome's house but no record of the promise is found anywhere in it.

The Swart family gathers around the television and watches in tearful joy as South Africa wins the Rugby World Cup.

On the drive back from visiting Scaly City, Amor announces she will move to Durban and work as a nurse.

Astrid confesses her affair with her husband's political business partner to Father Batty, who refuses to grant her absolution.

At Jake Moody's insistence, Father Batty accidentally reveals that Astrid came to him to confess a sin before she died.

During a therapy session, Anton admits he feels anxious about seeing Amor because the two of them always seem to be on opposite sides.

At Astrid's funeral Mass, Salome is permitted to sit in the front pew alongside the Swart family for the first time.

Desirée wakes in the morning to find farm worker Andile running up to tell her Anton has shot himself dead in the field.

The family lawyer tells Desirée that Anton left significant debts and that selling the farm requires all three siblings to agree.

Amor climbs onto the roof of the Swart farmhouse and scatters Anton's ashes over it before leaving for the airport.

Behind the headline deaths of the Swart story lie quieter moments of moral failure and occasional grace that define the family's character. Salome, the family's devoted Black maid, is barred from Rachel's segregated church funeral and prays for her privately at home instead, a kindness the Swarts never acknowledge. As apartheid ends and the country changes, the family clings to old patterns: Manie breaks another promise to Amor by sending her back to boarding school, and his will contains no record of his deathbed agreement with Rachel. Over the following decades, Astrid's compulsive affairs, Anton's paralysis, and South Africa's rising crime rates compound the family's unhappiness, while a Rugby World Cup victory offers a brief, illusory sense of national unity. When Astrid is murdered and Anton later kills himself, the surviving witnesses to Manie's original promise dwindle, and the burden falls entirely to Amor. Her final act of scattering Anton's ashes from the farmhouse roof marks both the end of the Swart line and her own release from the weight of her family's history.

The overlooked details behind each Swart family funeral and its aftermath.

Marina shows thinly veiled disgust at Rachel's deathbed conversion back to Judaism during the drive to the Swart farm.

Amor cannot bring herself to view Rachel's body waiting in the hearse and runs away to hide outside the house.

Astrid tells Amor she was at Rachel's bedside when she died; the narrator immediately reveals this is a lie.

Alone at night, Manie reflects on years of infidelity and gambling, and the religious transformation sparked by Amor's childhood lightning strike.

After leaving the Swart farm, Reverend Simmers rides home scheming about eventually acquiring some of the Swart family's land.

Anton's military unit is deployed to suppress riots near Johannesburg, and a woman protester is killed by his gunfire.

A rioter throws a rock that shatters the car window and strikes Anton on the head during the drive back to the farm.

During Rachel's funeral service, Amor gets her first period; Marina impatiently sends Astrid to deal with it instead of paying respects.

Anton visits Manie's hospital room and tells his comatose father he still has absolutely nothing to apologize for.

At the post-funeral gathering, Anton finds his father's gun in the study and fires it to scatter a band of baboons raiding the food.

Anton calls Desirée, a girlfriend from his youth, and makes plans to see her now that Manie's funeral is over.

The narrator briefly inhabits the perspective of a homeless man called 'Bob,' who is arrested by police for failing to produce his papers.

Jake visits a medium named Sylvia, who tells him Astrid's lover had a name something like Roger, Richard, or Robert.

Going through Anton's study, Amor discovers his long-unfinished novel and finds it bears a striking resemblance to The Promise in form and content.

Amor walks to the exact spot on the farm where lightning struck her as a child and stands there as rain pours down around her.

Beneath the surface of the Swart story lie private revelations and small turning points that define each character's moral limits. Manie's religious conversion, born from the trauma of Amor's childhood lightning strike, ultimately does little to make him a more honest or generous man, while Simmers's scheming about the Swart land reveals his true nature from the beginning. Anton's guilt over killing a Black woman during a military operation is a wound he never properly reckons with, and his growing depression plays out in telling gestures, from firing a gun at baboons to calling up an old girlfriend as a last grasp at normalcy. The novel's experimental perspective repeatedly surfaces in detours through minor characters' lives, most strikingly in a brief portrait of a homeless man arrested for lacking papers, underscoring that the country's systemic failures are visible everywhere. As the story approaches its end, Amor's discovery of Anton's unfinished novel forces a confrontation with how every story is shaped by whose perspective tells it. The novel closes on a deliberately unresolved note, with Amor standing in the rain at the childhood spot marked by lightning, free of the promise at last but uncertain about what comes next.

The hidden moments and discoveries that expose the Swart family's moral failures.