All of that is true. After the burns, the bills devoured everything. Your mother sold jewelry, borrowed money, begged relatives who liked to quote Scripture more than offer help. The clinic treating you discounted what it could, but skin grafts and medication still cost more than mercy ever seems to. The lawyer who first promised justice stopped returning calls. The bakery reopened under another name six months later.
You had wanted to become a nurse. Instead, you became an expert in survival arithmetic. Rent or medicine. Bus fare or lunch. Compression garments or electricity.
“I thought about you for a long time,” he says. “Not in a romantic way. More like… as a question I couldn’t put down. I kept wondering what became of the woman with the workbook.”
You laugh again, sharper this time. “Congratulations. Here I am.”
He takes the blow without moving.
“Years later, when the school hired me, you walked in carrying linens and introduced yourself as Eden. The moment I heard your voice, something in me recognized you, even though I had never truly heard you before. Chika had read me a quote from that report. A nurse had asked whether you wanted a mirror after your first surgery, and you said, ‘Not yet. I’m still trying to remember the old face well enough to mourn it properly.’”
You go perfectly still.
You said that.
You had forgotten saying it, but now memory returns with ruthless precision: the smell of antiseptic, your mouth cracked from dehydration, the nurse with kind eyes trying too hard not to pity you. Your mother pretending not to cry by the window. And you, high on pain medication and grief, speaking like someone standing at her own funeral.
“When you spoke at the school,” Obinna says, “your voice had changed a little from the injuries and time, but there was a rhythm to it. A carefulness. I knew.”
