The message came in on a Thursday afternoon, casual as a grocery list.
She was turning a year older in two weeks. She would like a specific novel as a gift, A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in George Martin’s Game of Thrones series. She knew exactly what she wanted. She sent the request the way you ask someone to pick up bread on their way home.
It was not a bread situation.
To understand why, you need a little context. Pauline and I were not together. We had not been together for over a year. I had ended a relationship I should not have ended and she had done exactly what you do when someone ends things. She had moved on. She had a life. She was fine.
I was not fine.
I had spent most of 2018 trying to get her attention in ways I could not admit were about her. The Dubai trip. The skydive above the Palm Islands. The WhatsApp statuses shared with the specific energy of a man performing for an audience of one who was not watching. She did not check statuses. The universe made its point clearly.
And then, out of a long silence, this message arrived. Simple. Friendly. Completely unaware of what it was doing to me.
She wanted a book.
I said yes immediately and started looking the following morning.
The hunt
Here is the thing about January 2019 and Game of Thrones books: the world had gone sideways.
HBO had just confirmed that Season 8, the final season was coming in April. The promotional machine was in full swing. #ForTheThrone was everywhere. Millions of people who had only watched the show were suddenly remembering there were books, going into stores, buying everything George Martin had ever written. The existing novels were flying off shelves faster than they could be restocked. A Feast for Crows – Book Four, the one she specifically wanted had been sitting quietly in the mid-series section for years. Now everyone wanted it.
I checked Kitwe first. Nothing.
I called Mulenga, the kind of friend you contact when you have exhausted your own options; he knew where things were in Lusaka, how to navigate a city for something specific. He walked around, checked the usual places. Nothing in Lusaka either.
That left abroad. I reached out to Mwansa in the USA. The timing, he told me, was too short to ship anything in time.
Two weeks. One book. An entire continent that had apparently decided to read it simultaneously.
One week had passed. One week remained.
I sat down and did what anyone does when they have exhausted all reasonable options. I consulted Uncle Google. I searched bookstores in Zambia and worked through the results until I found a shop at Arcades shopping mall in Lusaka. I had been there during my UNZA days. The kind of place that stocks what other shops do not bother with. I called.
They had it.
I called my colleague Peter, who was working from ZESCO head office in Lusaka. I explained the situation with the urgency appropriate to a man who had just located a rare artifact. He went same day at lunch, walked in, bought it, confirmed the same afternoon.
The book existed. It was coming to me. Crisis over.
It was not over.
The gift that got out of hand
Now I had a book, and I had a feeling that a book was not enough.
Not for this. Not for what I was actually trying to say.
I called my cousin Lulu, who had a hand of gold in gift boxing and event decor. I told her the concept – Game of Thrones, the final season coming, something that goes beyond just handing over a novel. I told her I wanted it to mean more than the book. What else can we add, what can we do with the packaging, how do we make this an experience rather than a transaction.
She asked the right questions. I answered them. And then she worked.
What arrived at my office on that Thursday was not a birthday gift. It was a production.
A black Khaleesi t-shirt. A Winter is Coming mug bearing the Game of Thrones sigil. The chest itself – styled to look like something you would find in a castle corridor in Westeros, embossed, dark, latched — holding everything inside it. And slightly apart from the rest, because no detail in this gift was accidental: a Manchester United pillow. She was a United supporter. So was I. The pillow was not decoration. It was a signature.
I looked at what began as a response to a simple request and understood that I had once again significantly overcommitted.
I called Sana, my nephew, who had been quietly in my corner through all of this. He had been the one saying just go, Uncle on the days I was talking myself out of action. He looked at the finished chest and said:
“This is either going to work, or it is going to be a very good story.”
He was right on both counts.
The arrival
She had mentioned her family was coming through on the weekend and she would not be available. So I went on the Thursday, unannounced.
The drive from Kitwe to Ndola on the dual carriageway takes just over 40 minutes when the road is clear. The chest was in the back. The BMW – black on black, windows tinted, the car I had bought in 2018 during the year of trying to get over her, which had comprehensively failed moved through the evening with that particular engine note that makes you feel, briefly, like everything is under control.
I got to Northrise and called her. She was home.
I went to her door first, just to confirm she was there, then walked back to the car to get the chest. And then, because some gestures are not complete without a soundtrack, I opened the car and pressed play.
The Game of Thrones theme filled the street.
I walked back to her door with the chest in both hands and the music carrying ahead of me.
She came out. Looked at the box. Looked at the car. Looked at me. Her hand went to her mouth.
I set it down and she started opening it; the t-shirt first, then the mug, then the pillow, each layer revealing something new, her reaction building with each one. And then the book, at the centre of everything, the thing she had asked for two weeks earlier when she thought she was making a simple request.
She said she could not believe it. More than once.
We took some pictures. She thanked me with the kind of warmth that lands in your chest. We held each other for a long moment before I stepped back.
I drove back to Kitwe that evening with the kind of smile that is difficult to explain to someone who was not there. Not because the evening had gone the way I imagined. Because something had shifted that I could feel but not yet name. She had reached out. I had shown up. The chest was in her house. The book was in her hands. The Manchester United pillow was on her couch.
The rest would follow, or it would not.
What the book was actually about
I was not looking for a book. I was looking for a way back in. And since I could not say that, since the timing was not mine to determine, the situation was not simple, and I did not know what I was to her anymore – I said it the only way available to me. Through effort. Through specificity. Through a Game of Thrones theme playing from a parked car on a Thursday evening in Northrise.
You do not spend two weeks searching an entire country, exhaust your contacts on two continents, and commission a castle chest from your cousin for someone you are casually fond of. You do all of that for one reason, even when you are not ready to say the reason out loud.
The book hunt was not about the book. It was a statement before the statement. A way of showing up fully for someone before you have the words or the position to explain why.
She received a gift. What I was actually delivering was an answer to a question she had not yet asked again.
Most of the important things we do for each other are like that – imperfect deliveries of feelings we do not yet have the language for. The book was the message. The message was not about the book.
A few months later, she said yes to something else entirely.
That story, a beach on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, a man on one knee, a placard in the sand is already written.
And what came after that is a story I am still living. One that, six years in, keeps surprising me.
But that is for next week.