Writers 
CHAPTER EIGHT: Similoluwa's Story
Ada was out of the toilet and running before the clerk finished the sentence.
Bed 6 was already surrounded — a junior nurse fumbling with the oxygen line, Similoluwa half out of the bed despite her stitches, screaming a sound that didn't have words in it anymore, just pure animal terror.
"Out of the way — out!" Ada shoved past a porter and reached the cot.
The baby was blue around the lips. Not breathing. Limp in a way that made Ada's whole body go cold and, at the same time, absolutely certain, the particular calm that only comes when the body has done a thing so many times it no longer waits for permission from the mind.
She scooped the infant up, tilted the small head back, two fingers finding the sternum.
"Call Dr. Adisa. Now. Tell him respiratory arrest, Bed 6."
"Ada, abeg, abeg save my baby—" Similoluwa was sobbing, reaching, and a nurse held her back gently by the shoulders.
Ada didn't look up. She counted compressions under her breath, small precise presses with two fingers.
"Come on," she whispered, so quietly only the baby could have heard it. "Come on now. Ẹ jọ̀wọ́. Please."
Three compressions. A breath, gentle, through the small mask. Three more.
The baby jerked. Coughed. A thin, furious wail broke out of her — the most beautiful sound Ada had heard in her entire career — and the whole room seemed to exhale at once.
"Oxygen, quick," Ada said, voice shaking now that the crisis had passed and her hands were allowed to remember they were human. "And get Dr. Adisa here to check her properly, even if she's breathing now."
Similoluwa was crying too hard to speak, clutching her own chest as if she could hold her heart in place by force. When Dr. Adisa arrived and confirmed the baby was stable — dehydrated, slightly premature, but stable — the girl finally let herself be pulled back into the bed, exhausted past words.
Ada stayed. She told herself it was professional. She knew it wasn't only that.
Later, when the ward had gone quiet again and the baby lay sleeping under the warmer, Ada pulled a stool beside Similoluwa's bed.
"You saved her," Similoluwa said, her voice hoarse and small. "Twice now. The night we came, and now."
"That's my job." Ada busied herself checking the girl's pulse, an excuse to avoid her eyes.
"No." Similoluwa shook her head slowly. "I don see many nurses for that Epe clinic where I dey work as house help. Nobody ever hold anybody like say the person matter." Her eyes, red-rimmed and tired, found Ada's face and held it. "Why you dey care so much, ma?"
Ada's hands went still on the girl's wrist.
"I care about all my patients," she said carefully.
"Hmm." Similoluwa looked away, out the window at the dark. For a long moment neither of them spoke, and Ada thought the conversation had ended.
Then, quietly, almost to herself, the girl said: "You know, I no even sabi my real mama name."
Ada's chest tightened. "Tell me," she said, before she could stop herself. "If you want to."
Similoluwa was quiet for a while, picking at the edge of the hospital blanket.
"Woman I call Mama, for Epe, she no be my real mama," she began. "She tell me, when I turn twelve, say she carry me from Ijebu-Ode as small small baby. She say my real family no fit keep me, so one old woman arrange for me to come meet her family. She and her husband, dem just lost pikin the same time, so na like God arrange am." Similoluwa's mouth twisted, bitter. "That's the story wey dem tell me. Like say I be small gift wey fall from sky."
"And after that?" Ada's voice came out barely above a whisper.
"After that, na work, work, work." Similoluwa's jaw tightened. "I no go proper school past primary six. I dey fetch water, dey wash plate, dey mind their real children when dem born after me because God, in fact, no waste time to bless dem with their own pikin after all." A short, humourless laugh. "So I understand quick quick why dem carry me come. Not because dem love me. Because dem needed extra hand."
"I'm so sorry," Ada said, and meant it with her whole chest, though the apology carried a weight the girl in front of her had no way of understanding.
"The man of the house—" Similoluwa's voice dropped further, and something in her face closed "That's how I born this baby. I no go talk more about that one."
Ada didn't push. She reached instead and covered the girl's hand with her own, the way she would with any frightened patient, except her fingers were trembling in a way she hoped Similoluwa was too exhausted to notice.
"You did nothing wrong," Ada said. "Do you hear me? Nothing that happened to you is your fault."
"Everybody dey born with somebody wey wan them," Similoluwa said, staring at the ceiling now, her voice flat with a grief too old for sixteen years. "Even ashawo for road get one auntie wey dey worry for dem. Me, I no get nobody. Not one soul for this whole Nigeria wey go raise hand if I die tonight." Her eyes slid sideways to the sleeping baby in the warmer. "Na only her I get now. And I no even sabi how to keep her safe."
Ada sat with the weight of that sentence pressing on her chest like a physical thing, and she understood, with a clarity that frightened her, that she was looking at a girl who had every reason in the world to hate the person who had handed her over as an infant to strangers — and had absolutely no idea that person was sitting beside her bed, holding her hand.
"Similoluwa," Ada said slowly, testing whether she had the courage yet to say more. "If you could ask that old midwife one question — the one who arranged everything, that night you were born — what would you ask her?"
Similoluwa turned her head and looked at Ada properly, something sharpening behind her tired eyes.
"I go ask her," she said, "why she never try harder to find somebody who go actually love me. Why she just give me to the first hand wey reach out."
The words landed in Ada's chest like a slap.
"And if she tells you," Ada said carefully, "that there was no time. That the choice had to be made in one single night, by people who were themselves young and frightened and had nobody to guide them — would that be enough? Would you forgive her?"
Something in Similoluwa's expression shifted — not suspicion exactly, but a girl sensing there was more weight behind a question than the question itself carried.
"Why you dey ask me like say you know her personal," she said slowly.
Ada opened her mouth. Closed it again.
Before she could find an answer that was neither a lie nor the whole unbearable truth, the ward door swung open, and Dr. Obi stepped through it, his eyes finding Ada across the room with the particular satisfaction of a man who had just confirmed something he already suspected.
"Nurse Fashina," he said pleasantly. "I thought I told you Bed 6 was not your assigned patient tonight."
