Unavoidably Yours.

Chapter One: Home Coming.

KITAN.

LONDON

The emergency department at St. Thomas’ Hospital never truly sleeps. At two in the morning, it has transitioned into a methodic unfurling of chaos.

The bustling activity of the day shift has softened into a steady, predictable murmur.

In the lull, the cardiac monitors sound louder than they should, their steady pings echoing against the linoleum. Under the aggressive hum of fluorescent lights, there is no room for fatigue.

Dr. Kitan Peters leans against the nurses’ station with a paper cup of coffee that is keeping him on his feet.

He stares at the patient board, the names and numbers blurring at the edges:

· Bed 4: Fracture

· Bed 9: Chest pain

· Bed 12: Waiting for CT

He rubs a hand down his face, the stubble on his jaw scratching against his palm, and exhales a long, shaky breath.

“Don’t tell me that’s your third coffee tonight.”

Kitan glances sideways.

Amelia Clarke stands beside him in navy scrubs, her blonde hair twisted into a frantic bun that suggests she gave up on vanity hours ago.

“Fourth,” he corrects.

She snorts, the sound sharp in the quiet station. Kitan lifts the cup and takes a careful sip anyway. It tastes like regret.

Across the department, the double doors hiss open. A paramedic leans into the weight of a stretcher, guiding it through the threshold with practiced ease

Another patient. Another long night. Another life temporarily falling apart.

The rhythm of emergency medicine is strange in that way. It trains you to treat catastrophe like routine. Someone’s worst day is just your regular Tuesday.

Amelia nudges him with her elbow. “You look fried.”

“I feel fried.”

“When was your last day off?”

He thinks about it. Then he thinks harder. “Define day.”

“Jesus, Kitan.”

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that.”

“Because I am.”

She studies him for a moment, her eyes narrowed in blatant disbelief, then shakes her head. “You know there’s a life outside this building, right? Friends. Sunlight. Relationships.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Relationships?”

“Yes.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “You’re thirty-three this year, and you’ve dated exactly nobody since I met you.”

“That’s not true.”

“Name one.”

“Tricia”

“Doesn’t count. You refused to even admit you liked her. That was a talking stage at best.”

He opens his mouth to retort, then closes it again.

Amelia grins victoriously. “Exactly.”

Before he can defend his honor, the trauma pager on his hip vibrates against his skin. They both look down at the small, glowing screen, then back at each other. The playful atmosphere evaporates instantly.

“Bed seven,” she says, her tone leveling into a flat, clinical steady.

Kitan pushes away from the desk. The fatigue is replaced by the sharp, familiar spike of adrenaline.

Work first. Always.

********

Forty minutes later, the department settles again. The patient is stabilized. The adrenaline has faded into a dull, heavy ache.

Kitan stands at the sink, scrubbing his hands with slow, deliberate motions while the tap runs cold.

Across the room, Amelia leans against a cabinet, her thumbs flying across a tablet as she taps out her notes.

“You were good in there,” she says, her gaze never leaving the screen.

He shrugs “Just another night.”

“That man would disagree.”

Kitan dries his hands with a paper towel, the coarse paper rasping against his skin. It always strikes him as strange how easily people call him “calm” during a crisis. Inside, it never feels like calm. It just feels like a singular, violent focus.

A vibration buzzes in his pocket. His phone.

He glances down at the screen: Oyinda.

At this hour? His brow furrows, a small crease forming between his eyes that Amelia catches immediately.

“Everything okay?” she asks, her voice dropping its professional edge.

“Give me a moment.”

He steps away, ducking into a quieter alcove, and answers. “Oyin?”

There is a small, hollow pause. Then his sister’s voice cracks through the speaker. “Kitan.”

Something about the way she says his name makes him straighten immediately. He knows that tone. He has heard it exactly three times in his life:

Once, when she broke her arm at thirteen.

Once, when their mother was hospitalized for chronic malaria.

And once, when she called him sobbing after her first heartbreak.

“Kitan… Daddy is sick.”

The hospital corridor suddenly feels ten degrees colder.

“What happened?”

“They admitted him yesterday,” Oyinda says, her voice thin. “But he’s been sick for a while.”

His grip tightens on the phone until his knuckles ache. “Admitted where?”

“St. Catherine’s.”

Kitan is already doing mental calculations. Flights. Time zones. Consultants. Symptoms. The variables spin in his head like a malfunctioning Rolodex.

“What’s the diagnosis?”

“They’re still running tests.”

The answer offers no comfort. His doctor brain immediately rushes to fill the silence with the worst-case scenarios: Tumor. Stroke. Heart failure.

He presses his fingers hard against the bridge of his nose, trying to ground himself. “Why didn’t you call earlier?”

“I didn’t want to worry you,” she whispers. “Not until we were sure.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m worried.”

Kitan stares through the glass doors of the emergency department. Inside, nurses move in a blurred choreography between beds. Monitors beep. Ventilators hiss. Life continues like clockwork. Meanwhile, five thousand kilometers away, his father is lying in a hospital bed, and for the first time in Kitan’s career, he is on the wrong side of the glass.

“I’m coming,” he says, his voice like iron.

“You don’t have to. The flights, the hospital—”

“I’m coming, Oyinda.”

Her breath hitches, a small, rugged sound of relief. “Okay.”

“I’ll call Mum.”

“She’s already here. She hasn’t left his side.”

Of course she hasn’t. Kitan’s grip on the phone is so tight his hand begins to tremble. “Oyin?”

“Yes?”

“How bad is it? Give it to me straight.”

There is a long, suffocating silence. When she finally speaks, her voice is a ghost of itself. “Very bad. Kitan... I have never seen him this sick. He looks... diminished.”

The word lands heavier than any formal diagnosis. Diminished. To a doctor, it’s a terrifyingly vague descriptor; to a son, it’s a death knell.

Kitan swallows against a sudden, dry lump in his throat. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

The call ends with a soft click. For a moment, he simply stands there, the fluorescent lights overhead feeling like a spotlight on his own helplessness.

Amelia approaches slowly, her eyes searching his face. The victory from their earlier banter has completely evaporated.

“Kitan? What’s going on?”

He slips the phone into his pocket, his movements mechanical. “My dad’s in the hospital.”

“Oh my God. I am so sorry”

“I need to go to Nigeria.”

“That’s fine. I’ll speak to Barry. I can cover your rotation. How long?”

He shakes his head in stiff motion. “I don’t know.”

Amelia watches him carefully, her clinical intuition kicking in. She sees the way he’s looking through the walls rather than at them. “You’re not coming back next week, are you?”

Kitan looks down the corridor again. As if on cue, the emergency department doors hiss open, and the rhythmic flash of blue lights sweeps across the floor as another ambulance arrives.

But suddenly, the sirens sound muffled, like he’s underwater. The bustle of the department feels miles away.

He says the words again, and they taste like ash: “I don’t know.”

For a man who survives on certainties, on protocols and clear-cut diagnoses, the sudden lack of a plan feels like a hemorrhage he can’t stop.

ENITAN.

LAGOS

The conference room smells faintly of stale coffee and growing impatience.

Enitan Adeyemi sits at the far end of the table, her laptop open, one elbow resting lightly against the polished wood surface as she listens to a man twice her age explain numbers that do not make sense.

He speaks with the unearned confidence of someone used to being believed which annoys her to no end.

“…so when you factor in the appreciation over the next eighteen months,” the client says, gesturing vaguely toward the projection screen, “the valuation should realistically sit around—”

“Three point eight billion naira,” Enitan finishes quietly.

The man nods immediately. “Yes. Exactly.”

She studies the spreadsheet on the screen for a few seconds longer, her expression thoughtful rather than confrontational. The rest of the room hangs on her silence.

Her boss clears his throat. “Enitan?”

She closes her laptop with a soft, decisive click before speaking. “The valuation assumes demand that does not currently exist.”

The client’s smile falters. “What do you mean?”

She reaches for the remote and advances the slide. “If you look at comparable developments within the same corridor over the last three years,” she says calmly, “you’ll notice that occupancy rates plateau after the second quarter.”

Another slide appears.

“Your projections assume eighty-five percent occupancy within the first year.” She glances pointedly at him. “That has not happened once in the last five projects.”

Silence spreads across the room like spilled ink. Her boss leans back in his chair slowly. The client shifts, his suit jacket bunching at the shoulders.

“Well… projections are projections.” the man mutters.

“True,” Enitan agrees pleasantly. “But investors usually prefer projections that resemble reality.”

The laughter that follows is polite but unmistakable. Her boss pinches the bridge of his nose like he’s trying not to smile.

“Alright,” he says finally. “Let’s revisit the assumptions.”

The meeting ends fifteen minutes later.

As the room empties, her boss stops beside her chair.

“You enjoy doing that, don’t you?”

“Doing what?” She asks coyly.

“Politely dismantling million-naira fantasies.”

Enitan slides her laptop into her bag, the zipper a sharp, metallic rasp in the now-quiet room. “If the numbers worked, I wouldn’t have to.”

He shakes his head in amusement.

“Remind me again why we hired someone this stubborn?”

She looks up, a faint smile touching her lips. “Because stubborn people prevent expensive mistakes.”

He laughs under his breath, the sound echoing slightly as he walks away.

*********

By the time Enitan steps out of the glass tower in Victoria Island, the sky is already dimming into that hazy orange of the fading sunset.

She exhales, a long, slow release of tension, as she unlocks her car. The workday lingers in the stiff line of her shoulders, the residue of ten hours buried in a messy map of cash flows and liability clauses.

Corporate finance carries a particular brand of exhaustion that is not just physical. It is the mental fatigue of staring at spreadsheets long enough to see patterns that other people miss.

Her phone buzzes in the center console as she pulls onto the road. She ignores it.

It buzzes again. Persistently this time. She ignores it still, overwhelmed by a hollow, buzzing kind of fatigue.

Traffic crawls across the bridge, a sluggish migration toward the island’s quieter residential pockets.

Ahead, headlights stretch into an endless, shimmering ribbon of red and white. By the time she reaches her apartment building in Lekki, the formerly orange sky has surrendered completely to the night.

Her apartment sits on the third floor of a modest, well-kept complex. It is nothing extravagant, just enough space for someone who spends most of her waking hours somewhere else.

She unlocks the door and steps inside, the silence greeting her like an old friend.

Her heels come off first, abandoned near the door without a second thought. Her laptop bag lands on the dining table with a heavy thud.

She walks straight to the kitchen and pours herself a glass of water, the cold glass a sharp contrast to the day’s lingering heat

The apartment is neat in a way that suggests routine rather than obsession. A few plants thrive by the window. Books are stacked on the coffee table, their spines worn from use.

On the shelf, a framed photo sits at the forefront - two teenage girls in oversized school uniforms, laughing into the camera with a wild, unrestrained joy the world hasn’t yet managed to touch.

Oyinda.

Enitan sinks onto the couch, the glass of water cold in her hand. Only then does she reach for her phone.

Five missed messages. Three from her mother. Two from Oyinda.

She bypasses her mother’s name and opens Oyinda’s message first.

Oyin:
Call me when you see this.

Another message beneath it.

Daddy is in the hospital.

The glass of water pauses halfway to her lips. Her stomach drops, a cold stone settling in her gut. Her fingers move with a frantic precision now. She dials.

Oyinda answers on the first ring. “Eni.”

The relief in her voice is unmistakable.

“What happened?”

“He collapsed yesterday.”

Enitan sits up fully. “What do you mean, collapsed?”

“They’re still running tests.”

“Which hospital?”

“St. Catherine’s”

Her mind races ahead of the conversation. The image of Mr. Peters in a hospital bed refuses to take full shape in her mind. For as long as she has known him, he had always been the perfect picture of health.

She is already standing, reaching for her keys. “I’m coming.”

“Eni, it’s late, the roads—”

“I’m already leaving.”

There is a rustle of movement on the other end of the line.

“Have you told Kitan?” Enitan asks.

“Yes. He’s coming home.”

Enitan exhales slowly. If Kitan is flying back then it must be really bad.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll be there soon.”

She ends the call and stands in the middle of her apartment for exactly three seconds.

Then, she moves with lightening speed. Laptop back into her bag. Keys in hand. Lights off.

By the time she locks the door behind her, the city outside has surrendered fully to the night. Somewhere across Lagos, the man who paid her way through university is lying in a hospital bed.

She presses the key fob and her car’s headlights flash alive, cutting through the darkness. Tonight, there is only one place she needs to be.

---

Author’s Note: Welcome to Kitan and Enitan’s story! 🙃 we are starting off strong, we cover this ship with the blood of Jesus oo, make nothing do am.🫠

See you next week Monday.🫶🏽