“Miss, your colleague is there. I will call him to wait for you,” the guard says, recognizing me from when we entered. He opens the door a sliver just as Clay raises his hand to hail a passing taxi.

“No,” I say cheerily. “No need to call him. We are going to different places. Excuse me while I check my messages.”

I take my phone out of my bag and pretend to tap through messages. I give Clay’s taxi ample time to drive away before I step outside. The guard watches me, more out of curiosity than obligation.

Though I am grateful not to have made this journey alone, I know that there are some things I need to do on my own. I adjust my headscarf once more, covering my ears and my hairline so I won’t draw unwanted attention. The guard clears his throat. I open the door and step out into the cold homeland.

Chapter 54

In our third year of residency, after a particularly hellish week in the hospital, I took Dayo out for sushi to celebrate her birthday. With half our training still to go, we were too far from the end to see the light yet. We decompressed over cleverly named cocktails and an assortment of rolls served in a wooden boat.

We were putting in eighty hours each week during a brutal flu season.

Half of our patients were placed in isolation, and we were donning yellow gowns, blue gloves, and white masks just to enter their rooms and ask how they were feeling. A construction worker had developed a rare fungal infection in his bloodstream, and a jewelry maker had just returned from Mexico with a tumor in her lungs after paying for a therapy we’d never heard of. The patient of the week award went to the man who had been declared a VIP when he’d been admitted. I was paged urgently to his room and walked in to find his wife holding tubing in her hand. She was threatening to rip the urine catheter out of him while his mistress stood on the other side of his bed, fuming.

We’d just repaired his abdominal hernia, and he seemed close to incurring another hole in his body. I told his wife how many hours I’d worked in the past week and how many more I’d have to work if I told my chief that I watched my patient’s urethra get torn apart. She dropped the tubing, took out her phone, and snapped pictures of her husband and the other woman before storming out.

I predict his cause of death will not be old age, Dayo had said, her hands swirling over an imaginary crystal ball. Then she’d gone wide-eyed with inspiration and claimed to know just what we needed to take a break from reality. When we left the restaurant, Dayo led me two blocks over to meet someone named Everly.