SO MUCH HAS CHANGED

The woman convicted of abducting Zephany Nurse as a baby is out on parole - and it's a time of complicated emotions for everyone involved

- MARELIZE GRBICH

AN ICY wind slices through the Cape Flats although the clear blue sky holds the promise of spring. A new season has also arrived for the woman who lives inside the walls of this house.

Lavona Solomon, the woman who kidnapped newborn Zephany Nurse and raised her as her own child for 17 years, was recently released on parole and will serve the last three years of her sentence under correctional supervision at home.

After seven years in prison, Lavona (59) is putting together the pieces of her life in the grey-painted house with its black iron gate. It's the same home she shared with her husband, Michael Solomon, and Zephany. It's here too where Zephany became a mother herself, first to a daughter, Sophia (6), then to a son, Matteo (4), and where she was living when she met the man she'd end up marrying.

Yet Lavona is on her own now - Michael filed for a divorce while she was behind bars and Zephany recently moved to Muizenberg with her husband, Justin Sheldon, and her two kids.

When YOU arrives at the Lavender Hill property the front door is slightly ajar and Lavona, dressed in a light-grey tracksuit, can be seen seated on a couch. She's eating something from a bowl and holding a cup in her other hand.

When she looks up and sees us, she breaks out into a broad smile.

"I'm not allowed to talk," she says through the door, but she keeps smiling.

Her sister, Labeeqah Jordan, emerges from a back room and opens the gate.

"She may not speak to the media," she says. "It's part of her parole conditions. All I can say is that she's doing well. There's a lot of joy that she's home and family and friends came from all over to welcome her. The neighbourhood kids are especially happy to see her.”