Writers 
CHAPTER FIVE: Mama's Silence
Ada didn't go home after her shift ended. She went straight to the old cemetery on the outskirts of Itamerin, where the grass grew wild between the older graves and the newer ones stood in neat, cemented rows.
She found the headstone she remembered from childhood.
YEWANDE OLUWASEUN. 1998 — 2016. Sun re o, ọmọ mi.
Sleep well, my child.
Ada crouched in front of it for a long time, her nurse's uniform gathering dust at the knees, doing arithmetic she didn't want to finish. 2016. Eighteen years old, not seventeen — she'd misjudged the girl's age that terrible night. Eighteen years old, and gone.
Sun re o, ọmọ mi. Sleep well, my child.
Not my sister. Not our daughter, from a grieving family that had shared the words together. My child. Singular. Personal. The kind of inscription a mother chooses, alone, for a child that belonged only to her.
Ada's hand went cold against the warm stone.
She thought of every August for as long as she could remember — Mama Folasade rising before dawn, dressing in her darkest wrapper, taking a small basket of white flowers and going out alone, refusing company, returning hours later with red eyes she blamed on "dust" and a silence that lasted the whole day after.
Ten years now this August, Ada realized, and felt something in her chest crack clean down the middle.
She waited until evening, until the compound had gone quiet and Bisi had gone to a friend's house and it was only the two of them under the low light of the sitting room, before she asked.
"Mama." Ada sat across from her grandmother, hands folded tight in her lap to keep them from shaking. "Who be Yewande?"
Mama Folasade's needle, which had been moving steadily through a torn wrapper hem, stopped mid-stitch. She didn't look up.
"Wetin you ask me?"
"Yewande Oluwaseun. For the old cemetery. 1998 to 2016." Ada kept her voice level, the way she'd learned to deliver bad news to frightened patients
. "You dey visit her grave every August, Mama. Ten years now. Who be she to you?"
The silence that followed was long enough that Ada heard the wall clock ticking, heard a motorcycle pass on the road outside, heard her own heartbeat in her ears.
"Why you dey ask me this now?" Mama Folasade's voice had gone very quiet, very careful. "After ten years, why now?"
"Because I need to know, Mama." Ada leaned forward. "Because I think — I think maybe I already know part of the answer, and I need you to tell me if I'm right, or if I'm just tormenting myself for nothing."
Mama Folasade set down her needle and thread and when she finally looked up, her eyes were wet, and older than Ada had ever seen them.
"Yewande," she said slowly, "was your mother's younger sister. Your aunty."
Ada's breath left her in one long exhale, as though she'd been holding it for ten years without realizing.
"My mother has a sister," she repeated, testing the words. "Mama, you told me my mother died alone, with nobody around her. You told me she die for hospital, quiet, peaceful. You told me—"
"I told you what a small girl needed to hear," Mama Folasade said sharply, and then, softer, ashamed: "I told you a story I could live with telling."
"So tell me the truth now." Ada's voice cracked despite herself. "Please, Mama. I'm twenty-nine years old. I'm not a small girl anymore."
Mama Folasade was quiet for a long moment, her weathered hands twisting the fabric in her lap.
"Your mother, Aduke, died when you were three days old," she finally said. "Not Yewande. Aduke was my first daughter. You were her only child." She swallowed hard. "Yewande was my second daughter. Aduke's junior sister. Fourteen years junior, because God delayed her for me. I nearly lost hope before she came."
"And Yewande died in 2016," Ada said slowly, the pieces sliding into place with a horror she could feel gathering in her stomach before she even had the full shape of it. "How, Mama? How did she die?"
Mama Folasade's face crumpled, just for a moment, before she forced it back into stillness.
"She died," Mama Folasade said, "the same way you delivered your babies for people, back when you used to help Iya Bimbo. Bad labour. Too much blood. No proper hospital, because she was ashamed, because the man who put belle for her na big man's son and she was frightened of what would happen if people knew." Her eyes lifted to Ada's, sharp and sudden. "You know this story already, don't you? I can see it for your face. You know more than you dey tell me."
Ada's mouth had gone completely dry.
"Mama," she whispered. "That night. Was Iya Bimbo the one who attended her?"
"Yes." Mama Folasade's voice was barely audible now. "And there was a small girl helping her. Holding light. Fetching water." Her eyes, wet and terrible, fixed on Ada's face. "I never asked her name, because I couldn't bear to know it. I couldn't bear to put a face to the person who was in that room when my Yewande bled to death, and could do nothing to stop it."
The clock on the wall ticked on, indifferent, while the two women stared at each other across ten years of silence finally, catastrophically, breaking open.
"Mama," Ada said, and her voice came out as barely more than air. "That small girl was me."
