But when the pilot announced their descent, Olamide looked out the window. It was white. Very white. But there were no skyscrapers. There was no London Eye. There were just endless trees and snow.
“Helsinki,” she whispered, tasting the name like expensive wine. “The land of milk and honey.”
But the moment the automatic doors of the Vantaa airport slid open, the honey turned to ice.
The cold did not just touch her. It slapped her.
Olamide clutched her handbag. Her teeth instantly began a rhythmic dance of their own. She walked into the arrivals hall, pushing her trolley with the elegance of a duchess, expecting a chauffeur in a tuxedo holding a sign with her stolen name.
Instead, she saw him. Dr. Femi.
He was not wearing the Armani suit she had imagined. He was not standing next to a Mercedes G-Wagon. Femi was dressed like an Eskimo who had just wrestled a bear. He wore a parka so thick it doubled his size, heavy trousers that looked like tarpaulin, and boots. Boots that had clearly seen the battles of life.
“Ola!” Femi shouted, his face lit up with a genuine, blinding joy. He rushed forward.
Olamide froze. She wanted to turn back and run into the plane, but Femi engulfed her in a bear hug. He smelled of pinewood, cold air, and something muskier, something like a goat, but stronger.
“Darling, you are here. But why are you shivering? Ah, I told you to bring a thicker coat. The temperature is minus fifteen today.”
“Minus fifteen? Where is the car? Turn on the heater, please.”
“The truck is outside. Welcome to Finland, my love.”
The truck was a battered, reliable pickup.
Olamide climbed into the high passenger seat, her heart sinking into her stomach. As they drove away from the airport, they plunged into a forest that seemed to have no end. Thirty minutes passed. One hour passed. Two hours.
“Femi, where are the shops, the malls, the restaurants?”
“Oh, the city is for tourists. We are going home. The farm is in Lapland, farther north. It is peaceful. Just us, the reindeer, and the huskies.”
“Farm? Reindeer?”
“Yes, I told you, didn’t I? When we spoke last month, you said you could not wait to help me birth the calves. You said the city noise gave you headaches.”
“Yes. Yes. I just… I have jet lag.”
When they finally arrived at the cabin, Olamide realized that her village people had followed her to Europe without a visa.
The cabin was made of logs. It was beautiful, yes, like a picture on a calendar, but it was isolated. There were no neighbors. There was no Uber. There was silence. A loud, deafening silence.
Inside, it was warm thanks to a roaring fireplace, but the furniture was simple. No velvet sofas. No flat-screen TV covering the wall. Just books, wooden chairs, and rugs made from animal skin.
“I have a surprise.”
Thank God. Finally, here comes the diamond necklace.
“One of the huskies, Luna, is pregnant and is due to deliver on Saturday. I know how much you love dogs. You can help me deliver the puppies. It will be our first bonding activity.”
Olamide stared at him. She looked at her manicured nails, which she had paid twenty thousand naira to get done.
“Bonding activity?” she squeaked.
That night, Olamide did not sleep on a bed of roses. Femi was a devoted Christian, so they slept in different rooms.
Saturday came, and Olamide stood in a cold barn holding a flashlight while Femi worked on a panting dog. The smell was overwhelming. When Femi asked her to hold a bloody towel, she screamed and dropped it.
Femi looked at her, pausing in his work.
“Ola, you are a nurse. You see blood every day. Why are you acting like a princess?”
“It is the… the altitude. I am feeling dizzy.”
Femi finished the delivery alone, casting worried glances at his fiancée.
The next days were not a honeymoon. They were an orientation for a correctional facility.
Olamide, the queen of Ibadan slay queens, the duchess of Instagram, was reduced to a farmhand.
At 4:00 a.m., the alarm clock screamed like a banshee. Femi was up in devotion. He knocked on her door.
“Morning devotion,” he announced.
Olamide groaned, pulling the duvet over her head.
“Can we pray on Zoom?”
Femi pulled the covers away.
“We pray together.”
They prayed on the floor together. Knees on the floor.
Olamide knelt, her knees aching on the hardwood. While Femi prayed with fire and thunder, binding the spirits of the air and land, Olamide dozed off. She only woke up when Femi shouted, “Amen!”
Then came the chores.
Shoveling snow was not exercise. It was torture. Olamide’s expensive wig, the bone-straight one she had stolen from her sister’s box, froze into stiff icicles.
But the final straw, the moment the camel’s back broke, was the kitchen incident.
It was Thursday evening. Femi came in from the cold, rubbing his hands.
“My love, I have been craving your cooking. I haven’t eaten a proper Nigerian meal in two years. Please make that your special egusi soup, the one you told me your grandmother taught you.”
Olamide panicked. The only thing she knew how to cook was boiling water for noodles. And even that, she sometimes burned.
But she could not say no. Not when she was this deep in the lie.
“No problem, baby,” she said, her voice shaking.
She checked the pantry. Femi had stocked it with ingredients he ordered online at exorbitant prices. She saw the bag of egusi melon seeds, dried stockfish, crayfish, and spinach, since there was no bitter leaf.
She stared at the pots.
How hard can it be? It is just soup. Put everything inside and boil.
And that is exactly what she did.
She did not fry the palm oil. She did not soak the stockfish to soften it. She threw the raw egusi seeds into a pot of cold water, added the rock-hard stockfish, dumped in unwashed crayfish, threw in two whole onions because she was too lazy to chop them, and covered the pot.
She cranked the heat to the highest setting and went to the living room to paint her nails.
Thirty minutes later, a strange smell wafted through the cabin. It did not smell like egusi.
“Dinner is served,” Olamide announced, carrying the bowl to the table.
Femi sat down, ready to eat. He looked into the bowl.
The soup was pale and watery. Clumps of raw egusi floated on top like islands in a flooded river. The stockfish stared back at him, hard and unyielding. The oil had separated, forming an angry red layer on top of the water.
Femi slowly lowered his hand. He looked at the soup, then at Olamide.
“What is this?”
“It is deconstructed egusi. It is how the chefs in Paris make it. It retains the vitamins.”
Femi took a piece of the stockfish. He tried to break it. It clattered against the plate like a stone.
“Ola, you told me you cook for the whole hospital ward during celebrations. You told me cooking is your therapy.”
“I am adapting to Finnish water. Why are you complaining? Do you know how hard I slaved over that stove?”
Femi stood up.
The warmth in his eyes was gone, replaced by the clinical, sharp gaze of a surgeon.
“You don’t know how to cook. You are terrified of blood. You nearly fainted when I cut my finger yesterday. You don’t know the lyrics to the hymns we sang on video calls. You sleep during prayers.”
He walked around the table, his boots thudding softly on the wood, and stopped right behind her.
“And yesterday, I saw a tattoo of a butterfly on your ankle. Olamiposi does not have a tattoo. She told me her body is the temple of the Lord. She hates needles.”
Olamide stood up, her heart hammering.
“People change, Femi. I got it to surprise you.”
“Who are you?” Femi asked.
The question hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.
Just as Olamide opened her mouth to lie again, Femi’s phone on the table pinged. Then it pinged again and again. A rapid succession of notifications.
Femi picked up the phone. He read the screen. His expression did not change, but his knuckles turned white as he gripped the device.
“It seems that the real Olamiposi has finally found a network strong enough to send an email.”
Olamide’s legs gave way. She collapsed onto the chair.
Femi turned the screen toward her. It was a picture. A picture of Olamiposi holding a newspaper with today’s date, standing in a cyber café in Ibadan. The caption read:
“I am here. The woman with you is my twin sister. She locked me up. She is an impostor.”
Femi looked at Olamide with a mixture of disgust and pity.
“You locked your sister in a storeroom for a visa.”
“It wasn’t like that. I just wanted a better life. Look at me, Femi. I am beautiful. I am finer than her. I can learn to be a nurse. I can learn to like the reindeer. Don’t send me back, please. My friends will laugh at me.”
“You think this is about beauty? You think this is about cooking? You thought you were stealing a golden ticket. But this is what you walked into. But you didn’t know the full story. Do you know why I live here? Do you know why I am in the middle of nowhere?”
“Because you are a vet.”
“Because I am hiding. I come from the Adedoyin family in Lagos.”
Olamide gasped.
The Adedoyins were billionaires. They owned shipping lines and half of Victoria Island.
“I hated the fake life. I hated women who only wanted me for my surname. I hated the slay queens who could not hold a conversation about anything other than wigs and trips to Dubai. So I came here to find peace, to find a woman who would love Femi the vet, not Femi the billionaire heir.”
Olamide wished the ground would open up and swallow her.
“I tested Olamiposi for six months. She passed every test. She loved me for me. And you? It took you three days to show me that you are everything I ran away from.”
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