"No, my lady," Pistorius responded in a crackling voice, directing his answer to Judge Thokozile Masipa.
"Are you sure? Are you sure, Mr. Pistorius, that Reeva did not scream after the first shot?" Nel persisted. "Are you, Mr. Pistorius?"
The athlete fell silent, stiffly staring at some fixed point ahead, expressionless. The courtroom waited for his response.
Moments went by, without a word. Then Pistorius emitted a deep sigh of resignation, leaning back, dropping his shoulders into his chair, his face frozen, blank.
"My lady, I'm giving him the witness time to console himself," Nel told the judge. "He is distressed, I'll wait a bit."
Making an effort to compose himself, Pistorius straightened up. Taking a breath, he looked directly at Judge Masipa.
His voice tearful, tremulous, he struggled to enunciate the words. "My lady," he said, "at no point did Reeva shout out, or scream. I wish she let me know she was there; she did not do that."
The Paralympian, on trial for the premeditated murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in the early hours of Valentine's Day last year, appeared exhausted.
Visibly strained under a third day of cross-examination by Nel, he stumbled over his answers, correcting himself time and again as the "bull terrier" prosecutor relentlessly pursued minute details of his account.
Appearing confused with Nel's non-chronological questioning, and frustrated with repeated questions, the murder accused admitted he misspoke several times during the course of Friday morning's testimony.
"I must have, but I don't remember. I made that mistake because I am tired," he told Nel, exasperated as the prosecutor asked him again about whether he remembered deactivating his home alarm system before carrying Steenkamp's body down the stairs, or if he just assumed he must have.
The mistakes have mostly been about semantics – if he meant to say "may have" or "did"; if he meant to say he "remembered" or "surmised" based on later fact – but Nel has latched onto each slip, triumphantly declaring that it shows Pistorius is tailoring evidence.
It is an assertion the prosecutor repeated often, raising his eyebrows as he told the athlete again and again he was lying; his version of events "so farfetched, it's impossible."
Nel's resonant rhetoric earned the slight prosecutor a warning from stern-faced Masipa, who reminded him to "mind his language."
"You don't call a witness a liar while he is in the witness box," she told Nel to nods of approval from the Pistorius family bench.
Alluding to the "reasonable man" test in South African law – would a reasonable person in the same situation make the same assumptions and react similarly? – Nel detailed the improbabilities in Pistorius' account of that morning: Why would an intruder go into the toilet? Why would Pistorius not check on Steenkamp's location and welfare as soon as he heard a suspicious noise? Why would he run towards perceived danger instead of fleeing?
But most critically, Nel questioned Steenkamp's alleged lack of response to Pistorius' shouts. Tuesday, during questioning from his defense attorney, Barry Roux, Pistorius testified that as he entered the bathroom and noticed an open window, he screamed to Steenkamp (who he insists he believed to still be lying in bed) to call police.
Pistorius argued that it was not improbable she would not have responded to his shouts if she believed danger to be approaching.
"Reeva had been involved in a similar incident before in her life, where she locked herself away," the athlete told the court. "From my understanding it was that she couldn't speak to people for a day or so afterward."
Nel was incredulous. "She wasn't scared of any intruder. She was only scared of you."
The prosecution's case is that the couple had a fight that night, with Steenkamp fleeing Pistorius, running to the bathroom.
Several neighbors testified to hearing a woman's "terrified, terrified screams," including during what they assumed to be a flurry of gunshots.
Pistorius remains adamant that Steenkamp did not scream, or say a word. "A woman didn't scream at any point," he told the court.
State pathologist Gert Saayman said it would be "unnatural" for someone who sustained Steenkamp's injuries not to cry out in pain.
Questioned about whether he heard screaming as he fired his 9mm, he told the court his ears were ringing as soon as he had fired the first shot. "If I couldn't hear, I couldn't hear. … The sound of the gunshots in the bathroom … you would not have heard anyone scream. The decibels of the gunshots … When I had finished firing the gunshots, I was screaming. I couldn't hear my own voice," he said.
"How could you exclude the fact that she was screaming, if you couldn't hear?" Nel asked.
Earlier in the day, when asked about his patchy memory of that evening, Pistorius' face quietly crumpled.
Asked if he was feeling emotional, he retorted, "Yes! I'm very emotional."
"It's a difficult time to remember," he muttered, as the court adjourned for him to gather himself.
"This is the night I lost the person I cared about. I don't know why people don't understand that."
As proceedings began Friday, Nel told the court that Steenkamp's mother June had passed a note to the prosecution, confirming that Pistorius had indeed requested a meeting with the family, prior to the trial, but that they had declined because "they felt they were not ready."
Nel had previously vociferously criticized the athlete for his emotional public apology to the Steenkamps as he began testimony Monday, suggesting that Pistorius had chosen not to consider the feelings of the family, instead staging a selfish public spectacle.
Pistorius' cross-examination will continue on Monday, after which Roux will try to undo the damage wrought by Nel.
The defense is expected to call up to another 15 witnesses before closing its case.
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