“It’s fine,” I call. “My mum’s bringing me some at the weekend. But thanks for the offer.”
“Have you got any plans?” Tori comes back into the room.
“We want to go and see the Highlands. How about you? Are you and Olive going into Edinburgh?”
“No. I’d totally forgotten that Will and I have to go home. My cousin’s getting married.” Tori sighs. “It’s going to be a total pain in the arse.”
“Don’t you get on?” I ask.
“No, no, we do, but my family gets kind of carried away.”
“It’s going to be big, then?”
“You have no idea,” says Tori. “They’ve rented a castle.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Tori says. “If your surname’s Belhaven, I guess you have to live up to it.” She takes two mugs off her shelf as the water starts to boil. She hands me the dark-blue one with the school creston it. “But that doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?” she asks. “Belhaven-Wynford?”
I shake my head. “Not really. Sorry.”
“Oh, God, don’t apologize—I love you for it.” Tori sighs. “It’s just that anyone who grew up round here has almost certainly heard of our family.”
“Oh, I didn’t know...” I pause.
“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s nice just being Tori,” she says, smiling at me. “Not the Belhaven-Wynford lass.”
“Well, you’ll always just be Tori to me,” I say. “And I’m sure it’s the same for Olive, Henry, and Sinclair.”
“That’s true,” she says, reaching for the huge metal canister where she keeps her pyramid-shaped tea bags. “And Val gets how tricky it can be sometimes.”
“Does he?” I ask.
Tori nods. “My mum sometimes works with his. You just know people when you move in the same circles.”
“So you knew Val before coming here?”
“A bit, but we never really spoke. Not till now.” Tori lifts her head. “He looked over my way fairly often, didn’t he?”
To be honest, I hadn’t noticed. “Yeah, sure,” I say hastily as Tori looks expectantly at me.
“I knew I wasn’t imagining it. I think he doesn’t want his friends to notice, but, well...” Tori trails off as someone knocks at the door. “Hell-ooo?” she calls, throwing the tea bags into our mugs and filling them with hot water as the door opens.
“Four o’clock. Study time, you two,” says Ms.Barnett, popping her head in.
“I know. Emma just needs some tea,” Tori declares. I glance apologetically at our houseparent, but she just nods.
“The tea thing works every time,” Tori says, once she’s shut the door behind her. “Whatever it is, you can always say you were just making a cup of tea.”
I have to smile. “I’ll remember that.”
“Still no milk or sugar?” asks Tori.
I shake my head. “Thank you.”
“Happy study hour, then,” she says as I walk to the door. “I so can’t be arsed. I’ll probably spend my whole time scrolling on TikTok.”
I laugh. “Can you tag me in some more of those book videos, please?”
