Writers 
The first face Suleiman saw clearly, once his vision stopped swimming, belonged to a man he had never met before, he is middle-aged, wearing a simple kaftan, with kind but tired eyes and hands that looked like they had done years of honest, difficult work.
"You're awake," the man said gently, leaning forward. "Good. You gave us all a fright, young man."
Suleiman tried to sit up too quickly and immediately regretted it, pain flaring sharply through his skull. The man placed a steady hand on his shoulder, easing him back down.
"Slowly, slowly. The doctor said you needed rest. That bottle nearly did serious damage — another inch and things would have been far worse."
Memory came rushing back in fragments, Wasiu's laughter, the sudden impact, the warmth spreading down his neck, the ground rising up to meet him. And then, sharper than the pain itself, the panic.
"My bag," Suleiman said, voice hoarse, struggling upright despite the pain. "There was a notebook, a bag, I need to..."
"It's here," the man said quickly, reaching beside the bed and lifting Suleiman's worn bag, the leather notebook still safely tucked inside. "I found it lying beside you at the market. I made sure nothing happened to it on the way here."
Relief hit Suleiman so hard he nearly cried, though he fought it back, still clinging to whatever pride remained after the humiliation of being struck down in public and dragged unconscious through the market. He took the bag with trembling hands and held it against his chest the same way he had the night he first rescued it from his old bedroom.
"Thank you," he managed. "Thank you for bringing me here. For bringing this."
The man smiled, though something behind his eyes looked troubled, almost angry, not at Suleiman, but at what he'd witnessed. "My name is Baba Yakubu. I have a small shop near where you were... working. I saw what those boys did to you. It was cowardly. Whatever their reasons, there is no excuse for it."
Suleiman said nothing, unsure how to explain to this stranger the full weight of everything that had led him to that rubbish heap in the first place, the buses, the houses, the relatives, the single room with one window. It felt too large, too painful, too shameful to summarize for someone he had just met.
But Baba Yakubu didn't press him. Instead, he simply sat beside the bed for the rest of the afternoon, occasionally speaking to the nurses, occasionally sitting in comfortable silence, until Suleiman's mother arrived —having been alerted by a neighbor's child who ran to fetch her — and rushed into the small clinic room, her face a mixture of terror and relief so intense Suleiman felt guilty for causing it.
"My son," she said, cradling his bandaged head carefully against her chest. "My son, what happened to you?"
Suleiman, exhausted, injured, and overwhelmed, finally allowed himself to cry not from the pain of the wound, but from the accumulated weight of everything: his father's death, the stolen inheritance, the single room, the daily scavenging, the mockery, and now this. It came out of him in a way he had been holding back for three long years, since the night he was nine years old and heard his mother's broken voice from the sitting room.
His mother held him and let him cry, saying nothing, simply being present the way she had learned to be present through every disaster life had handed them since his father's death.
Baba Yakubu quietly explained to her what had happened, praised Suleiman for his composure and hard work despite everything, and before leaving that evening, pressed a small amount of money into her hand to help cover the clinic bill, money she initially refused, out of pride, until he insisted.
"Consider it a small thing," he told her. "I have watched your son at that market for weeks now. He works harder and complains less than boys twice his age with far easier lives. A boy like that deserves better than what today gave him."
Before he left, he turned back to Suleiman, who was still holding the leather notebook tightly against his chest.
"That book," Baba Yakubu said, gesturing toward it. "It clearly means a great deal to you. What is it?"
Suleiman looked down at the worn leather cover, tracing the edge of it with his thumb, the same way he had done a hundred times without ever daring to open it.
"It was my father's," he said quietly. "He used to write in it every night before he died. I've never read it. I don't know what's inside."
Baba Yakubu's expression shifted into something thoughtful, almost solemn. "Three years, and you've never opened it?"
Suleiman shook his head.
"Why not?"
Suleiman searched for an answer, and when it finally came, it surprised even him with its honesty. "Because as long as I don't know what's inside, I still have something of him left to discover. If I read it all now, it will be finished. There won't be anything new left and sometimes feel scared to open it."
Baba Yakubu studied him for a long moment, the kind of look adults give children when they've said something far wiser than their years should allow.
"Or," he said slowly, "it could be that everything you need to survive what's coming next in your life is sitting inside those pages, waiting for you, and every day you delay opening it is a day you go without the one thing your father specifically prepared for you."
He left shortly after, promising to check on Suleiman's recovery, unaware that his simple words had planted a seed that would take root over the following days... a seed that would finally push Suleiman, three years after his father's death, to open the notebook for the very first time.
What he would find inside those pages, written in his father's careful handwriting, would change absolutely everything he thought he understood about his family, his inheritance, and the life that had been stolen from him.
