I know the exact moment I died.

It was 11:47pm on a Saturday in September, and I was wearing a white dress — ironic, I know — and the last thing I felt before London's concrete introduced itself to the back of my skull was Damien's hand between my shoulder blades. Not the kind of touch that steadies you. The other kind.

The pushing kind.

I heard Priya gasp. I remember thinking: She's good. Even now, she sounds surprised.

And then nothing. Then everything.

Then — this.

I sit bolt upright in a bed that smells like cheap fabric conditioner and hope, gasping like a woman who has just remembered she has lungs. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth. The room is dark. Small. Familiar in the way that certain nightmares are familiar — you can't quite place it until the dread settles in.

I know this room.

I lived in this room.

Past tense. Definitely past tense.

I scramble for the lamp with the efficiency of someone escaping a fire and knock over approximately three things before the light comes on, flooding the space with that specific yellow glow that cheap bulbs specialise in. I blink. I look around.

Peeling wallpaper with the tiny blue flowers I used to pick at when I was on the phone. The poster of Alicia Keys above the desk that I always meant to move and never did. The keyboard in the corner — my old Roland, the one I sold for rent money the year I turned twenty-two. The one I haven't sold yet.

My lungs stop working for a moment.

I'm twenty.

I look down at my hands. Steady. Strong. The hands of a woman who hasn't spent three years malnourished because her husband kept making comments about her appetite. The chipped navy nail polish I wore the week before my twentieth birthday because I thought it looked sophisticated and it absolutely did not.

I am twenty years old.

I died at twenty-eight.

I count to ten in my head, because somewhere in the rubble of my current situation, I remember that breathing is important. One. Two. Three. I do not hyperventilate. I do not cry. I am a woman who has already experienced her worst possible moment, and her worst possible moment involved a rooftop and a husband with very good cufflinks and no conscience, and this — whatever this is — cannot possibly be worse than that.

This is my old flat in Peckham. It is — I grab my phone from the bedside table, my old Nokia that I haven't thought about in years — 6:43am on the fifteenth of March, 2020.

My twentieth birthday.

I put the phone down very carefully, the way you put things down when you are trying very hard not to throw them.

Then I laugh.

It starts small — a huff, really, barely a sound — and then it becomes something bigger and wilder and honestly a little unhinged, and I press both hands over my mouth because my flatmate Cece is sleeping next door and the walls here are made of what I can only describe as hopes and prayer and extremely thin plaster.

I'm back.

I don't know how. I don't know why. I don't know which deity decided to take pity on the dead Nigerian woman in the cheap white dress and grant her a do-over, but whoever they are, I owe them a very nice bottle of wine and possibly a whole church service.

I'm back, and I remember everything.

Every lie. Every manipulation. Every careful dismantling of Zara Okafor that Damien Cole and Priya Shah performed together over eight years while I applauded from the audience like the world's most dedicated extra. I remember the business deals I steered him toward. I remember the ideas I had that he presented as his own. I remember the piano recital at twenty-three that I cancelled because he said it was "embarrassing." I remember the passport he held "for safekeeping." I remember the night Priya looked me in the eyes at my own dinner table, eating the jollof rice I cooked, wearing the perfume she said she'd "borrowed," and said, "You're so lucky, Zara. Damien is such a good man."

I remember all of it.

And here's the thing about dying with eight years of unfinished business lodged in your chest like a splinter — it is an extraordinary motivator.

I get out of bed.

I don't shuffle. I don't groan. I stand up like a woman with a plan, because I am a woman with a plan, and the plan has been eight years in the making, which technically makes it the most overdue plan in human history, but we're working with what we have.

I walk to the mirror above the small dresser and I look at myself.

Twenty. Bright eyes. Healthy weight. Natural hair in a bun that's seen better days but is entirely intact and enormous and mine. I run a hand over it, and something tightens in my chest — I'd had it relaxed by twenty-three because Damien's mother made one comment at one dinner and somehow that became my entire personality for five years.

Never again.

I study my own face for a long moment. The softness is still there — the round cheeks, the way my eyes turn down slightly at the corners, the little gap in my teeth I've always loved and once convinced myself I should fix. I look like someone who hasn't learned to be afraid yet.

Good.

Let's keep it that way.

I am getting dressed when my phone buzzes. I pick it up.

Priya Shah: Happy birthday bestieeeee!!!! Can't wait to celebrate tonight omg. You are going to LOVE what I planned.

I stare at the message for a long time.

Then I type back: Can't wait.

Because I have eight years of future knowledge and a rebirth and a revelation and a genuine desire to burn the entire edifice of my past life to the ground — but I am not stupid. Priya doesn't know I know. Damien hasn't met me properly yet. The first rule of this second life is simple:

Let them think I'm still the girl they buried.

I put the phone face-down on the dresser and smile at my reflection.

She smiles back.

She looks, for the first time in a very long time, dangerous.

Good morning, world. Did you miss me? Because I missed you.

I plan to make you regret that.