I met Laureano at the end of October 2024, on Tinder.

There is something almost offensively ordinary about that beginning, considering what followed.

No diplomatic reception. No military ceremony. No mysterious encounter in a hotel bar. Just two people approaching fifty, a dating application, a few photographs and the familiar business of deciding whether another human being might be worth meeting.

We exchanged messages for about a week before moving to WhatsApp.

He was Spanish, a naval commander serving at NATO’s Maritime Command in Northwood, West London. I was a British solicitor, born in the Soviet Union, with Polish and British citizenships behind my belt, a daughter, a professional life and a considerable history of my own.

He was intelligent. I was clever. We both were idiots.

At our age, physical attraction is wonderful, but finding somebody who can hold your attention for more than fifteen minutes is practically a geopolitical event. Laureano had knowledge, humour, curiosity and a lively, sometimes irreverent way of looking at the world. We could move from one subject to another without having to explain every intellectual turning.

He seemed interested in the way I thought.

I was certainly interested in the way he thought.

And there was something else about him, something I recognised long before I understood why.

He was a naval officer.

That detail may sound unremarkable to somebody who has never grown up inside a military family. To me, it meant much more than a profession.

It meant an entire world. It meant the safety feeling from childhood.

My parents divorced when I was about a year old. The man who represented safety, affection and masculine authority throughout my childhood was my grandfather.

He was a Soviet naval officer, a pilot, a captain of the first rank who had served during the Second World War.

He was signed up to the Army in 1942 when he was just 19. 20 years later he finished his military career in a rank of a Group Capitan. Laureano's rank in his mid 50s was lower.

In spring 2026 I discovered that Group Captain Ivan Vasilievich Korshunov has a named display at the newly opened Naval History Museum in Kronstadt. At that time I was under a humiliation attack from the governmental lawyers, and that message about my grandad's record to be recognised public was a sign for me. I got up back on my feet and fought back. I filed my Equality Act claim. The MoD lawyers called it "vexatious and with no merits". Now, six months and sixty thousand of British taxpayer's pounds later, they beg the court for another extension to file Defence due to "its complexity and the necessity to establish the boundaries of responsibility between the MoD and its Spanish and NATO counterparts".

My granddad was not a particularly large man, he had to fit into that toyish fighters of the WWII. But he was wiry, energetic, humorous and entirely capable of commanding a room without making a performance of it. There was something about his physical presence, his wit and his attitude to life that I would later recognise in Laureano. Or rather I wanted to see in him.

My grandfather belonged to a generation for whom a uniform was not simply a costume conferring status. At least in the world I knew through him, it represented obligations.

Duty. Discipline. Personal dignity. Responsibility for the people entrusted to you.

I grew up with a particular understanding of what it meant to be an officer. I saw it, I experienced it. It had less to do with rank than with conduct.

An officer did not need to announce his honour. He demonstrated it. But not in a way of showing off, but as a modus videndi.

And there was another story in my family.

My grandmother had Roma ancestry. In the social environment of Soviet naval officers, she was not necessarily the woman everybody would have selected as an ideal wife. She came with a background that could make her an outsider. But she was brilliant. By mind and body. She had that absolute confidence of a woman with no restrictions.

Her name was Liubov. It means "Love" in Russian.

And she was my grandfather’s wife. And she was worth to be killed for. There is a legend that actually this happened. But it was during the war, so the Love casualty, if it happened, was acknowledged as fell in action...

Her dignity did not depend on whether the surrounding community approved of her origins. She occupied her place because the man beside her recognised that place kind of by default, and because she possessed her own strength.

This was the family mythology, or rather history, in which I grew up. That mythology came later, when I, already at quite mature age, started thinking and analyzing my childhood.

My grandparents history was not a fairy tale about perfect people. A model of relationships in which love, loyalty, independence and responsibility could coexist.

I did not realise how deeply I had internalised that model until I met Laureano.

He was a naval officer. He was a pilot. He was funny. He was not a large man. He had that mixture of masculine confidence and mischievousness that reminded me of somebody I had loved and trusted since childhood.

I did not consciously compare him with my grandfather.

I did not need to.

Recognition is often faster than thought.

And sometimes what we recognise is not the person standing in front of us, but the pattern we have carried inside ourselves for decades.

We arranged to meet on a Tuesday. It was the middle of October 2024.

I was living in East London and had a shooting lesson scheduled near High Wycombe.

Laureano was renting a flat in Ruislip, about ten minutes by car from Northwood Headquarters and 30 minutes from my shooting club.

It was convenient to meet before my lesson.

That is how practical people sometimes explain decisions that have very little to do with practicality.

I went to his flat. I brought with me some borsch - a Russian beetroot soup.

We ate. We talked. We laughed.

And then, when the Borsch was over we looked t each other and the chemistry took over.

There is no particularly elegant way of describing what happened, and I see no reason to manufacture one. We wanted each other almost immediately. It was physical, intense, spontaneous and gloriously uncomplicated.

The kind of attraction that romantic fiction spends several chapters preparing for arrived without asking permission from either of us.

I went to my shooting lesson.

And I came back. Laureano left the keys to his flat in a secret place he shared with me on Whatsapp. When I got back to his flat, he was not there as he was taking his son back home, where he lived with his mum, from the football training.

That night, we became lovers.

There was nothing hesitant about it. We had known each other for hours, yet the distance normally separating two strangers seemed to have disappeared.

It was passionate, almost absurdly natural.

We stayed together through the night.

At some point, around two in the morning, I woke up.

Laureano was not in bed. I saw the light in the living room so I got up and went there.

And there he was.

He had laid the table.

Not a little plate with a sandwich. Not a glass of water and a few biscuits. An entire table covered with food. There seemed to be no empty space left on it.

He was sitting there, waiting.

He looked at me with that expression of pleased anticipation that I would come to know so well.

He said something like, “I knew you would wake up. So I prepared everything.”

I remember looking at the table.

And at him.

I was completely conquered.

Not by the quantity of food, although it was impressive. He literally took everything from the fridge and served it beautifully. Not even by the romantic absurdity of a Spanish naval commander preparing a midnight feast for a woman he had met only hours earlier.

It was the thoughtfulness.

He had imagined what I might need before I knew I needed it.

There was something almost childlike in the extravagance of the gesture, and something deeply tender in its execution.

We sat together in the middle of the night, surrounded by food we could not possibly finish.

Then we returned to bed.

And the Spanish passion resumed. Slavic Borsch to blame, obviously.

If somebody had written the scene for a romantic novel, I might have complained that it was rather excessive.

But real life is under no obligation to be tasteful.

And that night, I was very happy. I was very happy many days and nights afterwards.

The next day, Laureano did not particularly want to return to ordinary life.

He contacted work through WhatsApp, asking about being replaced so that he could spend more time with me.

I remember being amused by the speed with which this apparently disciplined military man was reorganising his professional day around a woman he had only just met.

There was something wonderfully reckless about it.

He wanted to be with me.

He made that desire unmistakable.

Within approximately a week or two, he asked me to move in. His flat was still in a deliciously student like emptiness state - just a mattress on the floor, a table and unpacked furniture boxes from IKEA.

I agreed.

From the outside, this probably looked ridiculous.

Two mature adults, both with complicated histories, behaving as though they had been struck by lightning.

But it did not feel ridiculous from the inside.

It felt familiar.

That is the distinction I find most interesting.

I was not an inexperienced girl who had never been loved. I was a woman with a profession, a daughter, a marriage, a divorce and enough life behind me to know that attraction alone does not sustain a relationship.

Yet I moved into his home almost without hesitation.

Why?

For a long time, the obvious answer seemed sufficient: because I had fallen in love.

That answer is true.

It is also incomplete.

I had fallen in love with a man who appeared to belong to a world I already understood since childhood.

His profession, his humour, his physical presence, his gestures of care and his confidence seemed to fit an internal structure that had been assembled long before he appeared.

I was not entering unfamiliar territory.

Or so I believed.

I was coming home to a version of something I had known for almost a half a century.

And perhaps that explains the speed better than chemistry alone.

Laureano's flat was lovely.

He had rented it privately while separating from his wife earlier in August 2024. As he explained it to me, the family lived Ministry of Defence accommodation, which made it financially possible for him to establish a separate home.

His wife remained in London with their son. Their daughter was at boarding school.

He described the marriage as ending and the divorce as a process already under way.

I had no reason at that stage to regard myself as a participant in their marital conflict.

I had never met his wife. I heard something about her from him. And I heard a lot of her on a daily basis. As she shouted, a lot. Mainly through recorded Whatsapp messages, which Laureano had an unfortunate habit of listening to on a loud speaker.

I did not know her personally, and I had no independent account of their marriage. What I knew came largely through Laureano and through the messages he received. I did not know Spanish at the time. But I quickly learnt my first three words in Spanish - Puta Espía Rusa.

At the beginning of November, I moved in.

There were practical adjustments. Moving from East London to West London was not simply a matter of transporting clothes and books. My professional routine had to change. I needed time to reorganise my work and settle into a different rhythm.

But the domestic transition itself was remarkably easy.

We enjoyed being together.

There was sex, laughter, food, conversation, affection and that peculiar pleasure of discovering another person's habits.

Laureano could be extraordinarily attentive.

He liked to look after me. He enjoyed giving, arranging, anticipating, providing. There was something theatrical about his tenderness, as though every gesture deserved an audience of one.

And I was a willing audience.

I liked being desired. I still do.

I liked being cared for. I still do.

I liked the fact that this man seemed delighted by my presence. I still do.

I did not interpret his attention as an attempt to define my role. Why would I? In my own understanding, affection and equality were not opposites.

I had never considered myself a woman who needed permission to be independent.

I assumed he understood that.

Indeed, he appeared to admire it.

What neither of us had yet tested was what would happen when admiration met disagreement.

The trouble with entering somebody else's life is that the furniture may be new, but the previous occupants have left their emotional belongings everywhere.

Laureano's marriage was not ending peacefully.

His telephone became a regular source of noise.

His wife sent long WhatsApp messages, sometimes in rapid succession, sometimes as extended voice recordings. Laureano had a habit of playing them aloud.

I did not speak Spanish well enough to follow everything, but I understood more than he probably realised. French gave me enough linguistic clues, and the volume supplied the rest.

There was shouting.

There was anger.

There were accusations.

I remember messages that seemed to continue forever, five minutes, ten minutes, sometimes followed by another and another.

It was exhausting even to hear them in the background.

I would ask Laureano what was happening.

He would tell me about the latest argument, the latest accusation, the latest demand.

From what he told me, his wife objected to the speed of his new relationship and to the fact that another woman was already living with him.

I could understand why the situation might be painful.

But I did not consider it my conflict.

He had asked me to move in. I had accepted. The responsibility for resolving the obligations of his existing marriage belonged to him and his wife.

I had no relationship with her to negotiate.

At the time, I privately regarded her reactions as excessive, even hysterical. That was my impression, formed from the fragments I heard and the account Laureano gave me. I knew nothing of what their marriage looked like from her side.

I did not yet have the full picture.

And I was not particularly interested in acquiring it.

I had not entered the relationship to investigate somebody else's divorce.

I had entered it to live with a man I loved.

My early relationship with his children was good. Whatever complications surrounded their parents' separation, I did not begin this story in conflict with them.

The domestic war was between their parents.

Or at least that was how I understood it.

There was, however, a curious contradiction in Laureano.

He could be wonderfully tender in private and surprisingly provocative in the way he presented things to other people.

He liked an audience.

He liked a joke.

And sometimes the joke seemed to matter more than the consequences of telling it.

I remember him telling me, amused with himself, that he had joked to friends about sleeping with a Russian spy.

A Russian spy.

Apparently, sleeping with a British solicitor was not sufficiently exciting.

A British solicitor with Polish citizenship, a professional career and a daughter was an entirely respectable proposition, but perhaps not one likely to electrify a group of naval officers.

A Russian spy, on the other hand, had possibilities.

There was danger.

There was sex. Wonderful, passionate sex. With elements of implied role play.

There was the delicious suggestion that he had somehow captured a tiger and brought it home.
I found the whole thing rather childish.

Not sinister. Childish.

Men tell foolish jokes. Military men, in my experience, are not immune to the habit. Sometimes the more elaborate the uniform, the more adolescent the humour underneath it.

I assumed everybody involved understood the difference between a joke and a fact.

I also assumed that professional military officers possessed sufficient judgement not to confuse the two.

Those assumptions seemed so elementary that I never thought to examine them.

After all, I was not concealing my identity.

I had been born in Leningrad, in the Soviet Union. I had long since renounced Russian citizenship. I was British and Polish.

My birthplace was part of my biography, not a secret operational capability. It is written in my both passports - British and Polish. It even appears in my driving licence.

My ability to shoot was not particularly mysterious either. I went to a shooting club. I enjoyed learning things. I had interests that did not fit neatly into the expectations some people might have of a middle-aged woman.

None of this made me a spy.

And I had no reason to imagine that anybody seriously believed otherwise.

What interested me much more was the man making the joke.

Why did he need to turn the woman he loved into something exotic for the amusement of other men?

At the time, I did not pursue the question.

I was too busy enjoying him.

There is a difference between being adored and being recognised.

It is a difference that can remain invisible for a remarkably long time, particularly when adoration is accompanied by tenderness, generosity and spectacular sexual chemistry.

Laureano adored me. I knew he did. I adored him back.

I do not need to deny that to tell the rest of this story.

I believe his feelings were real.

The midnight table was real.

The passion was real.

The laughter was real.

The pleasure of waking up beside him was real.

But love does not necessarily guarantee that two people see each other clearly.

I had looked at Laureano and recognised an officer from the world of my childhood. And when I looked at him through these lenses I decided not to see features, which did not fit with my childish expectations. It was my choice. Unconscious, but choice.

Perhaps he looked at me and recognised something equally compelling in his own imagination.

A beautiful woman. A young woman. A clever woman. An independent woman. A woman worth pursuing, protecting and displaying with pride.

Possibly even a woman whose independence was attractive precisely because it had not yet challenged anything he wanted.

I liked that image of a woman.

I can only describe the contrast between the man I encountered in those first weeks and the man I would come to know through subsequent events.

In October 2024, I believed I had met somebody with whom I could speak about almost anything.

That was one of the reasons I fell in love.

I was impressed by his mind before I was attached to his body.

I liked the fact that he could follow an argument, challenge an idea, make me laugh and surprise me.

For me, conversation was not simply a pleasant addition to intimacy.

It was part of intimacy.

I assumed that two intelligent adults who loved each other would be able to negotiate their differences.

I did not imagine that this assumption would eventually become one of the central questions of my life.

There is one more thing about the world I believed I had entered.

I did not regard the military as an alien environment.

My grandfather had given it a human face. Actually no, not human.

Military is mathematics. Hierarchy and discipline, as well as associated rituals, are really equations and systems, which you can easily navigate. They are quite simple and understandable, especially if you grew up inside of them.

I associated the officer's profession with a particular kind of responsibility, and I had no reason to think that a Spanish naval commander serving in NATO would understand those responsibilities less seriously than a Soviet naval officer from my childhood.

Honour.

Loyalty.

Restraint.

Accountability.

Respect for one's uniform, one's institution and the people affected by one's decisions.

It did not occur to me that I might have mistaken the uniform for the values I associated with it.

Nor did I appreciate how much of Laureano's life was organised by structures outside our flat.

There was the Ministry of Defence accommodation.

There was Northwood.

There was the Spanish chain of command.

There was NATO.

There were colleagues, ranks, reporting lines and a military community with its own rules of belonging.

All of this existed around us.

But inside the flat, it seemed remote.

We cooked, talked, made love, laughed and occasionally listened to another explosion from his telephone.

I was not trying to enter a military hierarchy. I knew my place near it.

I was not applying for a position in the Spanish delegation. I was curious about learning about the culture. Ultimately, two years later, I mastered it.

I was not seeking anyone's approval. I knew the process of getting approved. Or at least I thought I knew.

I was a woman living with a man.

It seemed a sufficiently ordinary arrangement.

What I did not understand was that other people might describe the same arrangement in entirely different terms.

And that those descriptions could eventually matter more to institutions than the woman herself.

I am writing this in October 2026.

Almost two years have passed since that first night in Ruislip.

The woman who woke at two in the morning and found a Spanish naval commander waiting beside a table overflowing with food could not possibly have imagined the life that would follow.

She did not know that the joke about the Russian spy would eventually appear in newspaper accounts, surrounded by allegations, insinuations and competing versions of events.

She did not know that the military community she had barely encountered would later be described as having formed opinions about her imaginary conduct and intentions.

She did not know that, beyond two Christmas events in December 2024, she would have virtually no social relationship with that community at all: no regular invitations, no coffee, no reciprocal visits, no ordinary opportunity to become a person rather than a description.

She did not know that her own country would subsequently impose an access restriction against her name, while later stating in court documents that she had not been designated a national-security threat and not being able to explain that contradiction.

She did not know that the language of military security, administrative discretion, personal relationships and national origin would become entangled in a dispute extending across institutions and borders.

She did not know that she would spend months asking questions to which she could not obtain satisfactory answers.

Or that the absence of those answers would become a subject of investigation in its own right.

She did not know that the man who seemed capable of discussing anything would, almost two years later, return to her life through a succession of messages in which she would repeatedly ask one simple question:

What do you actually want from me?

And receive demands, objections and accusations, but no proposal for the mutual action she was asking him to consider.

She did not know that the difference between communication and dialogue would become more important to her than anything either of them had said during their first week together.

Most astonishingly, she did not know what she herself would become.

She was already a lawyer.

But she would have to acquire an entirely new set of methods to understand the machinery that had entered her life.

She would learn to reconstruct decisions from incomplete records, compare incompatible institutional accounts, identify gaps in information and build litigation architectures connecting proceedings that different organisations treated as separate.

Artificial intelligence would become part of that work: not an oracle dispensing truth, but an analytical instrument for navigating documentary complexity, testing propositions and finding relationships between apparently disconnected events.

She would begin to study institutions as systems.

She would discover that silence can have a structure, that refusals can form patterns and that a document may reveal as much through the question it avoids as through the answer it provides.

She would begin speaking to journalists, not simply to tell her story, but to discover which questions independent observers considered worth investigating.

And she would become an artist.

That may sound like the strangest transformation of all.

A lawyer, driven into the world of music by a conflict involving military institutions, national security, a failed relationship and the peculiar bureaucratic treatment of a woman who had done nothing more extraordinary than fall in love.

But there are experiences that cannot be contained in legal submissions.

There are emotions that refuse to become paragraphs in a witness statement.

So she would begin writing songs.

She would create music, experiment with artificial intelligence, build a channel and find a way of turning experiences that might otherwise have consumed her into something she could make.

Not every truth belongs in a courtroom.

Some of them need a melody.

And the man?

His transformation would be different.

He would remain inside the institutional world whose values I had once imagined he embodied, pursuing his own grievances and his own understanding of what had happened.

I would now come to see him very differently from the man who prepared that midnight feast.

Whether he had changed, whether I had changed, or whether we had finally stopped mistaking our projections for each other is a question that runs through this book.

It would be easy to tell the story as a romance that went wrong.

It would also be easy to tell it as a story about a woman wronged by powerful institutions.

Neither version is sufficient.

This is a story about how we construct reality from the things we recognise, how institutions construct reality from the categories they possess, and what happens when those constructions collide with a human being who refuses to disappear inside them.

In October 2024, I did not know any of this. I did not know that in October 2026 I would ultimately block him from my phone and completely remove him from my life as I realised that he is really part of that sick environment, where men wear uniforms as decorations, not as insignia of honour or values. Men for whom women are objects, not subjects. Dollies, which could be admired, fascinated by and cared after, and broken and thrown away as soon as the game is over.

At that time I believed I had met an intelligent, passionate, Spanish naval officer with a great sense of numour. I do not meet many people who can make me laugh, but he was one of them.

I knew that he wanted me.

I knew that I wanted him.

I knew that he could make me laugh and that he had somehow understood the importance of a midnight meal.

I thought I understood his world.

I thought I recognised its values.

And when he asked me to move in, I said yes.

It was the easiest decision in the world.

Today's song - TÚ