Prologue
...which is a perfectly ridiculous way to begin anything, isn’t it? Mid-thought, mid-breath, mid-“oh, for God’s sake.” But that’s life, really. It doesn’t bother to give you neat beginnings with crisp edges. It barges in halfway through your tea, ruins your best trousers, and expects you to carry on as though you’d been rehearsing for it all along.
At least, that’s how it felt the night my life, my entire life, thank you very much, tipped sideways on the slick tiles of a London platform.
You’d think there’d been fireworks. Trumpets. An announcement from the BBC, perhaps: “This just in, Amara Tembo, a woman of ordinary means and extraordinarily bad luck, is about to have her fate entangled with a man who owns more property than she has socks.”
But no. There were no trumpets. There was me, half-spilled coffee, and a sketchbook vomiting pages like an incontinent goose.
Still, the thing about fate, it sneaks in disguised as clumsiness. And me, well, I’ve made a career out of clumsiness. Not an actual career, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t still be working shifts in a Covent Garden brasserie where my most frequent customer is an overcooked tourist demanding chips instead of fries. No, my talent lies in tripping over the edges of my own life and pretending it was all part of the choreography.
Here’s what you need to know about me: I grew up in a tower block that smelt permanently of damp and fried onions, the sort of place where children play football with a milk carton because actual footballs are far too aspirational. My father, God rest him, always believed money was a riddle he’d solve one day. He died trying, heart attack, fifty-two, chasing a pyramid scheme with more enthusiasm than sense. Mum did what she could: shifts, prayers, lectures about staying away from boys who could afford trainers more expensive than our rent.
And me? I drew. I sketched. I made crooked little worlds where people weren’t trapped by the postcodes they were born into. I was three when I picked up a pencil, six when Dad started demanding I draw him as a king (he liked crowns, thought it made him look powerful). He never knew that what I really drew was escape.
Fast forward a couple of decades and here I am: Amara Tembo, part-time waitress, full-time artist in denial, dragging a battered leather portfolio through rain-slick streets. London loves its rain. I think it’s in on the joke. And me? I’ve perfected sarcasm as an umbrella, it doesn’t keep me dry, but at least I look smug while I’m soaked.
So when he appeared, that stranger with eyes like the North Sea on a hangover, I wasn’t prepared. He didn’t belong on that platform. He looked... displaced. Too polished for the grime, too steady for the chaos. And yet there he was, crouched across from me, handing back one of my sketches as if it were something valuable, as if my smudged charcoal mattered.
Let’s get something straight: men like him don’t notice women like me. Not properly. They notice in passing, the way you notice the smell of coffee or the flicker of a busker’s guitar. They don’t linger. But he lingered. And my life, already teetering precariously on late rent and overdrawn bank accounts, lurched toward something I hadn’t asked for.
Now, don’t mistake me for sentimental. If anything, I specialise in dark humour. I laugh at the tragedies before they sink their teeth in. Sarcasm has carried me further than sincerity ever has. But even I couldn’t quite laugh when I realised who he really was. Or what it meant that he’d chosen me to notice.
Because, dear reader, if we’re doing this like some gothic confessional, you need to know that he wasn’t what he seemed. He wasn’t the rumpled stranger fumbling for change at the ticket machine. He wasn’t the man who shrugged off a suit like it offended him. He was, well. That comes later. And you’ll have to forgive me for not telling you outright now. Suspense, darling, is the only currency I can afford.
What I will tell you is this: love is not the neat little ribbon-tied miracle the films sell you. It’s messy. It’s brutal. It smells of sweat and spilled wine and sometimes, if you’re lucky, survival. And when it collides with secrets worth billions, it stops being romance and starts being something else entirely.
So here we are, you and I, standing on the edge of this story. My story. Our reluctant comedy of errors with a body count waiting in the wings. If you want comfort, go read Austen. If you want a fairytale, Disney has a back catalogue that’ll rot your teeth. But if you want to know how a girl from Brixton ended up running for her life through European train stations, dodging men with guns and wondering if the man beside her loved her, or was simply using her to keep his empire afloat, then stick around.
Because I didn’t just fall for a man. I fell for a masquerade.
And darling, the masks always crack.
