Deliso moved to her immediately. He held her arm and called out for the driver.
He told Zola to get her coat. They moved toward the car urgently. At the hospital, the doctors took Sophia away in immediately.
There was bleeding. There was internal distress that the doctors described with clinical terms that Deliso struggled to process.
He stood in the corridor with his hand against the wall for support. His chest was tight.
He kept asking the nurses for updates. He turned to Zola beside him and looked at her directly.
He asked her quietly what she had done to Safiwei. Zola met his gaze and said clearly that she had done nothing, that they had eaten the same food, that she did not know what was happening.
Her voice was steady, too steady. The doctors came out. There was nothing more they could do.
The bleeding had been too severe, the damage to her system too advanced. Cify was gone.
Anna and the pregnancy was gone with her. The doctor used the word poisoning. He said traces of a harmful substance had been found in her system.
He asked who had access to her food. Deliso did not answer the doctor right away.
He turned and looked at Zola again. Her face had not moved. She was still performing grief.
Standing there with the right expression on her face while the woman she had poisoned lay cold in the next room.
They drove home in complete silence. And when they were inside the house, Deliso sat down and did not move.
Zola sat in the chair across from him. Then the accusations began to surface. Not violent, not theatrical, but heavy and direct.
He told her he knew it was her. She told him he was in shock and not thinking clearly.
He told her the doctor had found poison. She told him she had eaten the same food.
He told her that the portions were different. She told him he was grasping for someone to blame.
Back and forth. And all the while, Zola held her lie like a shield. Delisa went into his bedroom alone and locked the door.
He sat there in the dark. He was not crying. He was past the point where tears came easily.
He was in that deep, hollow place where grief and rage lived together without enough room to move.
He picked up his phone. He called the police. He gave them his name and his address and told them what had happened.
Then he sat and waited. He could hear Zola moving around the house, her footsteps in the sound of her phone ringing.
She was making calls. He did not come out until he heard the knock at the front door.
Sola heard the knock too. She came to the door before Daliso could get there and looked through the glass and saw the uniform in the car.
The blood left her face. She stepped back from the door. She looked around the house as if searching for an exit that was not there.
Then she pulled out her phone with shaking hands and called her friends. She whispered to them that the new wife had died, that the police were at the door, that she needed help right now.
Her friend on the other end of the phone went quiet for a long moment.
Then in a voice that was almost casual, she told Zola that it did not matter now, that she had her husband all to herself.
They almost laughed. Almost. The call dropped when the police entered. Zola was arrested at the door.
She kept saying she had done nothing. She kept saying they had all eaten the same food.
She kept referencing her grief, her shock, her loss of the other woman, too. The officers listened and said nothing.
They took her to the station. They informed her of her rights. They charged her and somewhere across the city, her friends were already calling their lawyer.
The case had begun. The investigation moved quickly. The forensic team came to the house.
They examined the kitchen, the dining table, the dishes, the pots. When they took samples from multiple surfaces, the substance that had been found in Safara’s system was identified, and they were looking for its source.
Zola’s defense lawyer was sharp and wellprepared. He challenged the hospital findings. He argued that the food had been shared.
He presented Zola as a grieving co-wife who had been with Cphaway at the table.
The early stages of the case moved in Zola’s favor more than Daliso had expected.
But Daliso had something else. When they had moved into the house, he had installed a full security system.
Standard cameras throughout the building covering all entry points and main rooms. Zola had been smart enough to find the ones she knew about.
She had disabled the cameras in the kitchen and dining area 2 days before the incident.
She had located them, reached them, and disconnected them with deliberate precision. She had done it quietly and without drawing attention.
Ena, she had believed that removed her completely from the possibility of evidence. What she did not know was that Deliso had also installed a second layer, hidden cameras, smaller, built into objects in the room.
He had added these after bringing Safiway into the house. Not because he fully suspected Zola of anything lethal, but because he was a man whose life had taught him to protect himself from every angle.
He never forgot what he had heard through that hotel wall. He never fully lowered his guard.
These cameras were connected to a separate encrypted storage system that Zola had never seen and had no way of knowing about.
Every frame of that kitchen was preserved. The footage showed everything. It showed the food being prepared.
It showed the portions being placed. It showed Zola standing over Safo’s plate. It showed the folded paper coming out of her pocket.
It showed the substance being emptied into the food. It showed her folding the paper back and placing it in her pocket.
It showed her stepping back and calling out for them to come and eat. The angle was clear.
The timestamp was precise. There was no interpretation needed. The footage spoke in a language no lawyer could translate into innocence.
The court date was set. The hall was formal and heavy with tension. Both families were present on their respective sides.
Zola sat at the defense table with her lawyer composed on the surface. Deliso sat with his legal team.
The prosecution presented the forensic findings. They presented the timeline. They presented witness testimony from the hospital.
The defense challenged each item carefully. Zola sat through it all and held her story.
The judge listened. The process moved at the pace of the law, which is slower than anyone on either side of a painful truth can bear.
Then the prosecutor stood and told the court that the prosecution wished to submit a final piece of evidence.
He approached the judge with documentation and then the footage was brought up. A screen was set up and the recording was played.
The courtroom went very still. Zola watched herself on that screen. She watched her own hand come out of her pocket.
She watched her own fingers empty the substance into Sephio’s portion. She watched herself fold the paper and step back.
She watched her own face, calm and composed as she called them to eat. Now she watched all of it happen again, and this time there was nowhere to put it.
Her lawyer leaned toward her. She was not listening to him. She was staring at the screen even after the footage had ended.
The judge asked if the defense wished to respond to the evidence. There was a long pause.
Then Zola slowly turned her face away from the screen. Her lawyer made a brief formal statement, but the room already knew what the footage meant.
Yes, the judge reviewed the full record and the legal arguments over the following session.
Then the sentence came down. Life imprisonment, no possibility of parole. The gavl came down and the sound of it echoed in a room that had gone completely silent.
Her friends heard the verdict from their lawyer. They had walked away from Zola the moment the arrest happened.
They had disconnected themselves quietly, changed their stories, and gone back to their lives. They sat in someone’s living room and heard the words life imprisonment, and no one in that room said anything for a long time.
They had handed her the substance. They had told her it was harmless. They had told her it would only end the pregnancy.
And then when it killed a woman, they had laughed on the phone and told Zola she now had her husband to herself.
Every one of them knew what they had done. And now they had to live with the knowledge that their friend was behind bars for the rest of her life because of something they had given her.
Deliso buried Siwi on a quiet day, not a grand burial. He did not want spectacle around her name.
He wanted her to rest in peace and dignity. He stood at the grave for a long time after the others had moved away.
He thought about how she had sat at that table eating food that was supposed to nourish her when food that had been turned into a weapon against her.
He thought about her laugh. He thought about the morning they had gotten the confirmation of the pregnancy together.
He thought about how she had deserved none of what happened to her. None of it.
Zola was taken to a holding facility while awaiting formal trial proceedings. Her lawyer visited her twice that week.
Each time she sat across from him and maintained her position. She had not done it.
The food was shared. Ah, anyone could have tampered with it. She kept building the story from the inside of a cell, constructing defenses that grew more elaborate with each retelling.
She had convinced herself that if she said it enough times with enough calm, the court would eventually have to accept it.
She had not yet seen the footage. She did not yet know it existed. Her friends hired a very experienced defense attorney on her behalf.
They pulled money together quickly and the attorney reviewed the prosecution’s initial filings and believed based on what he saw that the case was largely circumstantial.
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