Writers 
CHAPTER FOUR: The Rain (Ten Years Ago)
Ijebu-Ode, 2016.
The rain that night had come without warning. Nineteen-year-old Ada Fashina was still in her first year of nursing school, but she had already spent two years shadowing Iya Bimbo, the community's most trusted traditional birth attendant, learning things the textbooks didn't teach or know one else knew— how to read a labouring woman's breath, how to know by smell alone when something had gone wrong.
That was how she came to be standing in a single mud-brick room off Itamerin Road, holding a kerosene lantern with a hand that would not stop shaking, while a girl no older than herself screamed through a labour that had already gone on too long.
"Push, push, e fẹ́ jáde!" Iya Bimbo barked, sweat running down her temples despite the cold. "Ada, hold the light steady, my pikin, no be time to shake now!"
The girl on the mattress brought in secretly by an aunt too ashamed to take her to the government hospital where questions would be asked about the absent father — arched with a scream that seemed to tear something loose in the room itself.
The baby came fast after that. Too fast. And then the blood came faster.
Ada had seen bleeding before. This was different; a dark, steady flood that soaked through the mattress in minutes, that made Iya Bimbo's confident hands suddenly uncertain.
"Ada, go go call ambulance, go call anybody, make you run!"
Ada ran. Through mud, through all the way to the junction where there was sometimes a working phone booth, sometimes not. That night, it was not. She banged on three compound gates before an okadaman agreed, for money she didn't have, to ride to the nearest clinic for help.
By the time help came, it was too late for the mother.
Ada would never forget standing outside that room afterward, rain plastering her wrapper to her legs, listening to Iya Bimbo's aunt wail inside while the old midwife herself sat on an upturned bucket, staring at nothing, murmuring "mi ò lè, mi ò lè" (I could not, I could not) over and over like a woman already half-mad with it.
And in Ada's arms, wrapped in a wrapper still warm from the dead girl's own body heat, was the baby. Alive and crying thinly.
"Wetin we go do with am?" the aunt had sobbed, unable to even look at the child. "I no fit keep am. My husband no go gree. Everybody go ask question — who be the papa, who kill my sister — I no fit, Ada, I beg you, I no fit."
Nobody in that room was equipped to make the decision that followed. Not the grieving aunt. Not Iya Bimbo, broken by her own failure. Not nineteen-year-old Ada, who had never delivered a baby alone in her life and had just watched a girl her own age bleed to death on a mattress.
But someone had to decide, and it fell to whoever was still standing.
There had been a woman, a distant relation of Iya Bimbo's, from a family in Epe who had lost a baby themselves months before and had, in the quiet desperate way of grieving mothers, let it be known they wanted another child, no questions asked, no papers needed.
It was Iya Bimbo, still trembling, who suggested it. It was Ada, holding the infant, who agreed.
"She go get better life for Epe," Iya Bimbo had said, more to convince herself than Ada. "Na better this way, Ada. Better than the mama's family throwing am for gutter, or worse. You understand?"
Ada had understood. Or she had told herself she understood, which at nineteen, exhausted and terrified and covered in someone else's blood, felt close enough to the same thing.
She had named the baby herself, in the hour before the woman from Epe arrived to collect her, because nobody else in the room could bear to.
Similoluwa. God's plan is good.
She had believed it, saying it. She had needed to believe it.
Ten years later, standing in a hospital records room with that same name printed on an admission chart, Ada understoo that naming a thing does not make it true. Sometimes it only makes the lie easier to carry.
She had never told Mama Folasade what happened that night. She had never told anyone. Iya Bimbo had died three years later, taking her share of the secret with her, and the aunt had moved away to Abeokuta not long after, glad, Ada assumed, to never speak of that rainy night again.
Only Ada remained. Only Ada had watched the whole thing from beginning to end, and only Ada had made the final call.
And there was something else. The dead girl's name. The girl on the mattress, seventeen years old, gone in one wet, relentless night.
Her name had been Yewande.
The same name, Ada now remembered that was carved into the small headstone in Ijebu-Ode's old cemetery that Mama Folasade visited alone, every August, on a date she never explained and Ada had never dared to ask about.
