These issues are known and was an oversight from modifying damage values.
The damage was increased, but the "love_value_until_defeat" wasn't changed.
The intended values are as follows:
"love_value": 240
"love_value_until_defeat": 1000
Zahra also doesn't quite behave normally with 'absorbed' dialogue, because she doesn't actually have any absorbed dialogue.
I did some testing and I couldn't replicate the interrupted dialogue.
It's fixed for next update, it seems.