Dee hands me a mug of coffee as I join her in the kitchen. She looks terrible in her rumpled dress. What little makeup she put on for the fund-raiser is now smudged into shadows around her eyes. I’m sure I look worse. At least the power is back on. They must have fixed the substation that the Coetzees disabled.

We only returned from the hospital a little over an hour ago when Mandla and Zodwa finally got the all-clear to come home. Mandla’s fine physically, though who knows what trauma now lurks in his psyche. Zodwa’s neck is in a brace as a precautionary measure and she’s covered in bruises.

My mind keeps returning to the image of her hands crossed in her lap in the emergency room. The nurse had whispered to me that victims of near strangulation almost always have flesh embedded under their fingernails, defensive wounds from when they claw at whatever is cutting off their air supply.

But instead of fighting off her attackers to save her own life, Zodwa clung to my boy, stopping them from taking him from her. That’s how the police said they’d found her after the security company notified them of the panic alarm being activated: unconscious but with Mandla clutched in her arms.

Why would she do that? Risk her own life for his. It doesn’t make any sense. Surely no one is that altruistic.

“I’m sorry I made you wait,” Dee says. “We should have come home as soon as you wanted to.”

“How could you have known? Thank God the panic alarm worked.”

We’re both lost in thought when a voice comes from the doorway of my room. “Does Mandla have AIDS?”

I turn around, not having heard Zodwa get up. “What?”

“Those men said Mandla has AIDS and he’s going to make everyone in the town sick with it.”

Damn that Mimi Coetzee! Damn her to hell. I think of the girl’s fist-ruined face and shake my head. She probably gave up the information to her husband to save herself in some way. Still, when it comes down to it, everything is a choice and she chose to put an enormous target on Mandla’s back.

“Zodwa, please come.” I hold out my hand and she walks over looking like a little girl in Dee’s nightgown. The neck brace must be uncomfortable.

Zodwa sits down next to me. “So, it’s true?” she asks.