Writers 
CHAPTER ONE: The Arrival
The rain had not stopped since evening prayers, and Ada Fashina was counting the minutes until her shift ended when the ambulance siren cut through the noise on Ward B.
"Oya, oya — move am, move am!" a porter shouted, wheeling a stretcher through double doors that banged against the wall.
Ada dropped the chart she was holding and ran.
On the stretcher was a girl — no older than sixteen, Ada guessed — soaked through, her wrapper stained dark at the waist, clutching a bundle to her chest like something might snatch it from her. The girl's lips were moving, but no sound came out. Just breath. Just fear.
"She don lost blood," the ambulance driver said, breathless. "We meet am for roadside near Epe junction. The baby never even get name."
"Baby?" Ada's eyes dropped to the bundle.
A newborn. Barely a week old, by the look of the cord stump. Too still. Too quiet.
"Get me Dr. Adisa, now," Ada barked at the junior nurse trailing her, already reaching for the girl's wrist to check her pulse. Thready. Weak. "And warm saline — quick, quick!"
The girl's eyes found Ada's face in the chaos, and something in them cleared, just for a second, like she recognized a familiar shape in the dark.
"Please," the girl whispered. Her voice cracked in the middle, like a child's. "Please, help my baby. I beg you, ma."
"I've got you," Ada said automatically, the words worn smooth from years of saying them. "I've got you, you hear me? Nobody go touch your baby without your say-so."
She peeled back the wet cloth to check the infant — and her hands, steady through worse things than this, went still.
The baby's face was small and pinched, eyes swollen shut, breathing too fast, too shallow. Ada had seen a hundred sickly newborns in ten years of nursing. This one made her stomach drop for a different reason entirely.
She looked up — really looked — at the girl's face. The high forehead. The gap between her front teeth. The small mole just under her left eye, exactly where Ada remembered it, except ten years smaller, ten years wetter with rain, ten years ago in a room that smelled of kerosene and blood.
No, Ada thought. No, no, no, this cannot be.
"Nurse Fashina." Dr. Adisa's voice, close behind her now, urgent. "Vitals?"
Ada didn't answer immediately. Her mouth had gone dry.
"Nurse Fashina!"
"S-sorry, sir." She forced her hands to move, forced her voice into the flat, competent tone that had carried her through a decade of night shifts. "Mother is hypotensive, possible postpartum hemorrhage. Baby is tachypneic, poor tone, needs oxygen now."
They worked fast after that — the way trained hands work when the body takes over and the mind is allowed, mercifully, to go quiet. IV line. Oxygen mask sized for something the length of a loaf of bread. Blood pressure cuff wrapped twice around a wrist too thin.
It was only when the immediate danger had passed — when the baby's oxygen levels climbed, when the mother's bleeding slowed under pressure and fluids — that Ada allowed herself to breathe.
She stepped back from the bed, peeling off her gloves with hands that were not quite steady, and looked again at the chart the porter had scrawled in a hurry.
Patient: Female, approx. 16yrs. Name given: Similoluwa.
Ada's knees went weak enough that she had to grip the edge of the nurses' station.
Similoluwa.
That was not a common name, plucked from thin air by a frightened boy on a roadside. That was the name Ada herself had given, in a whisper, over a wailing infant, ten years ago — the last thing she'd done before she ran out into the rain and swore she would never speak of that night again to a living soul.
"Nurse Fashina, you dey okay?" the junior nurse asked, frowning. "You don white for face."
"I'm fine," Ada said, too quickly. "Just — long shift."
She looked back through the glass at the ward, at the girl now sedated and sleeping, at the small bundle beside her breathing on borrowed oxygen.
Ten years, Ada thought. Ten years I have carried this alone. And now she is here. In my hospital. In my hands.
Outside, the rain had not stopped. If anything, it was coming down harder, drumming against the tin roof like something demanding to be let in.
Ada pressed her palm flat against the cold glass and made herself a promise she already knew, in her bones, she would not be able to keep.
Nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever, ever know what I did that night.
But the girl's face — that mole under her left eye, that gap in her teeth — had already told her otherwise.
The past had found her. And it had brought a baby with it.
