THE STAND-IN HEIR

Amber Rosaline Williams, Americas top model, Miss International Beauty winner two years in a row. The girl with the bluest blue eyes you could ever imagine, they looked like the ocean; Pacific not Atlantic. She had every girl’s dream feature, the fullest lips, long beautiful lashes and the sexiest legs for days.

I guess you’ve heard the saying ‘God gave everyone their own problems’, you might have not heard it before but now you have.

Amber was in a coma, the middle of life and death, her life barely hanging on by a thread, a single thread the doctors said could cut loose at any given moment.

She had gone missing five days before her body was found, that day she was meant to be at the studio modelling a Louis Vuitton bag from their latest collection, she never made it there. At first her family kept the news away from the press, they thought that maybe she just needed some space from the public eye, maybe she was just overwhelmed with work and decided to take a break, it wasn’t the first time she had done that after all.

The worries set in after day two, Amber hadn’t contacted even her fiancé and according to the tabloids, those two couldn’t go without communication for even two hours, a love so strong wouldn’t just vanish for two days without a word.

That same day, her father finally reported her missing and of course, in true TMZ style, the world instantly found out. Theories were created as to why she was missing, with some going as far as to push out assumptions of her making a debut into something new, maybe music, maybe acting a lead role, maybe not.

Worry grew, and it grew so much that a reward of one hundred thousand dollars was put out for whoever could give solid information about her whereabouts. For a lot of people, that was lifechanging money but for Brian and Samantha, Amber’s parents, that was nothing if they found their daughter. Nobody called in.

The day her body was found was a Tuesday, a couple had gone for an early morning jog when they saw a lady sloped on a bench facing the lake, she had blood covered all over her face with several bruises and a very obvious stab wound to her stomach.

The couple had even called the police to report a dead body, when the police and paramedics came, they were surprised to see her alive, barely breathing but alive. They rushed her to the hospital and did all they could for her but that wasn’t enough, she landed in a coma.

Her parents were devastated, even her siblings Aaron and Abigail who were at the other side of the world travelled down to console their parents and mourn her coming death.

Diana Raine Macro aka Raine Walters was what you would call a spy, but not for the DEA or FBI.

Rather she was a spy for girlfriends who thought their boyfriends were cheating, news stations who needed the details of what their favorite celebrities were up to, that kind of useless thing. She definitely wasn’t the type to chase after some murderer, she never claimed to be Sherlock Holmes.

On the 11th of August she got a call, one she didn’t pick because she was too busy enjoying the pleasures of a warm shower for the first time in a long time. Her landlord finally fixed the water heater after months of complaints and just at the right time.

She had just finished working on a case that left her covered in mud. An actress had contacted her from a friend of a friend to spy on her husband. She needed to find out for sure if the tabloids were true and she needed the evidence to obtain at least fifty percent of everything he had.

The job had been fairly simple because on the second day of following him around, he went out with some blonde chick, another actress and a friend of his wife. They drove to the middle of nowhere, one of his cabins down the forest to have a nice, calm dinner.

That meant Raine had to hide between some trees, laying in the mud for her to stay incognito enough to take some pictures. It didn’t take long for them to start kissing and making out and it took even a shorter period for them to enter back into the cabin, giving her time and chance to run back to the main road where the car she had rented, was parked.

She immediately met up with her client and gave her the printed pictures as well as an SD drive containing video and picture proof, she looked like such a mess that the woman ended up paying her double, earning her five thousand dollars in total. Rich people would pay about anything for bullshit.

The phone kept ringing for about ten minutes while she showered, she made sure to wash her hair, mentally reminding herself that she needed to get it re dyed at the root as her natural brown hair was peeking through all that red.

It took the water getting cold for her to get out of the shower. She used the small white towel she had gotten early that week to wrap her body, while cleaning her hair with another towel. The phone buzzed with several notifications, enough to get her to look at it.

Just Instagram news, but it brought her attention to the missed calls. She knew it was another client, she knew this meant more work, so she did the only logical thing she thought of, she switched off her phone.

She just needed the evening to rest, she would call back tomorrow, she would apologize and blame it on being busy, but for tonight she just wanted to be at peace.

She wore the only clean clothing she could find, her large tee that had torn and faded in several areas. Work had left her starved and she couldn’t exactly stop by any restaurant covered in mud so she decided to head to her kitchen.

Unlike her room, her kitchen was exceptionally clean, and that was because she hardly ever used it. There was only an expired carton of milk in the fridge, no bread, no fruit, no groceries.

She sighed like she hadn’t expected it, she sighed like she had restocked this week and the food had magically disappeared.

She had to go back to her room, switch on that dreaded phone and order uber eats. Five tacos, a salad bowl and a cold large drink. She waited for what seemed to be an hour, finally her phone rang and she happily picked it “Are you here?”

It wasn’t the uber eats driver though, it was a woman, Samantha, Amber’s mum.