Chapter 7: Sipho

It arrived on a Thursday morning, between her seven o’clock biochemistry lecture and the clinical pharmacology tutorial that followed it. She was at her desk with twenty minutes to spare, reviewing her notes from the morning session, when her laptop chimed with a new message to her UCT student email address.

The sender was listed as S.B. Zulu. The subject line was blank.

She looked at it for a moment without opening it. Then she opened it.

It was not long.

“Dear Amara Dube. My name is Sipho Zulu. I think you know who I am. I want you to know that I did not ask for this and I am sorry that it has caused problems for you. My father is a man who makes decisions and tells me about them afterward. I am not saying this to make excuses. I am saying it because I thought you should know that I had no part in approaching your family and I would not have done it this way if anyone had asked me. I hope your studies are going well. I am sorry again. Sipho Zulu.”

She read it twice. Then she read it a third time, not because she had missed anything but because she was a person who did not act on a first or second reading when a third reading was available.

She noted several things.

He had her university email address. That address was not publicly listed — it was in the UCT student directory, accessible to enrolled students and faculty and certain administrative systems, but not something a twenty-two-year-old engineering graduate in Pretoria should have been able to find without either accessing the directory through means he was not entitled to, or receiving it from someone with institutional access who should not have shared it. Someone had provided it to him or to his father. That was not a small thing.

He had written to her directly. To a minor. To the minor at the center of a legal proceeding that his father was a party to. Whether or not he understood the legal implications — and from the tone of the email she suspected he did not — the email itself was a document. It confirmed that he knew about the arrangement. It confirmed that his father had discussed it with him. It placed him in knowing proximity to a matter that was now before a court.

It was, in the language Advocate Nkosi had used in the documents she was beginning to understand, evidence.

Amara did not reply.

She opened her email client, forwarded the message to Dr. Dlamini’s address with a single line of her own above it — Received this morning. I have not responded — and then she closed her laptop, picked up her tutorial notes, and went to clinical pharmacology.