“Lan?”
“No.”
“Orlando?”
“I said no.”
“Fuck’s sake, Lando. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep walking on eggshells around you.” She holds up a hand to stop me from interrupting. Not that I had any plans to. “I deserve to be happy too. You don’t get to choose what I do with my life. I need space . . . I need . . .” She puffs out a long sigh. “We’re moving.”
My brain freezes for a few seconds. “Please don’t do this now.” I’m very grateful I didn’t eat any communal stick-potato. “Where? Moving where?”
Please not Cambridge. Please not Cambridge.
Daisy doesn’t answer for what must be close to a full minute, and when she does, she whispers. “Edinburgh—”
“What?!”
“It’s not like I want to move that far away from you, but . . . for now that’s where the best opportunity is.”
The marquee floor spins dangerously beneath my feet. “For Serasi, not you. You can’t be thinking of going all that way just for her . . . that can’t be true.” Scotland? My face is burning, eyes prickling with building tears. Daisy’s on the brink of crying too, and Serasi looks shell-shocked. “I can’t deal with this right now.”
“Lan, please. Let’s just talk about it,” she begs.
There are no words. I shake my head in response and blink back the pain searing through my airways.
“When, then? When can we talk?” she pleads.
“Email me,” I say. It’s what my father said to me after Mum died. I was thirteen, and distraught.
“Email you? Fuck’s sake, Lan. Please—”
I don’t let her finish that sentence. “I need the toilet,” I say, pushing her out of the way and running through the marquee.
I’m not aware of my surroundings, can’t tell who’s witnessing my demise, but thankfully I don’t see Harry Ellis anywhere.
As expected, the house is deathly quiet. The catering staff are packing up and cleaning, getting ready to disappear into the night. I head straight to my roombut falter as I reach the top of the stairs and hear Tim Gunn’s voice floating down to me. Wait, did I leave my TV on?
Twenty years of sneaking about has taught me which floorboards are creaky. I pull my boots off, and like a cat that’s also a ballerina, I slip soundlessly into my bedroom.
My closet door’s open, and inside, staring at my perfume collection whilst drinking my father’s wine straight from the bottle is . . . him.
Well, it certainly wasn’t on my bingo card to confront Harry Ellis today, but how much shittier can this evening actually get? I mean, if I got any lower, I’d be propping up the gates of Hell.
“Château Rauzan-Ségla, is it?” I say, nodding towards his beverage of choice.
Harry reels around, almost dropping the bottle.
“For a man with limited taste receptors, you sure know how to pick expensive plonk.”
His eyes rake over me, from top to toe and back again. His frown deepens by the millisecond as though it was he who’d stumbled across me stealing his father’s vino and rifling through his belongings.
He doesn’t even seem remotely embarrassed at being caught doing those things. “God, your accent is fucking awful. Do you ever just hear yourself and think, ‘Wow, is that really what I sound like?’”
“Yeah, I guess I do sometimes,” I say, which makes Harry blink in a double take. “So, are you going to share my father’s booze with me, or am I going to call the police on your ass?”
He still doesn’t answer my question. “How expensive is it?”
“What’s the year?” I sit in an armchair and prop my feet up on the matching pouffe.
