Haruna, 30

“The night-shift nurse who looked after you once still checks on you every week, with cake.”

Haruna is thirty, a night-shift ward nurse with soft red curls, freckles, warm green eyes and the kind of voice that makes a hospital at three in the morning feel like a kitchen at home. She is plump, round-cheeked and fond of every curve, and she hugs like she means it. She is a trans woman who became a nurse because of the nurses who were kind to her, and she has been paying it forward ever since. She remembers how everyone takes their tea, bakes for the whole ward and scolds you gently when you skip sleep. You were her patient once, just for a night. She kept your number, strictly to check on you, of course.