Girls don’t visit me. No one visits me except Zak. And my mother looks flustered in case this is a big deal and she should have prepared for it.

“I’m Amy,” she says, and, when Mum shakes her hand, she adds, “I lived here before you did. Tom thinks my parents locked me in my bedroom.”

Mum stares at me, then says, “He worries too much. I tell him, but…he has his ways.”

This is how she explains my OCD and my anxiety. She turns them into a quirk.

I’m surprised Mum said anything, because she’s usually too embarrassed. Sometimes she blames herself. She thinks I’d be different if our family had worked the first time around. Mum worries about my worries more than I do. I just live with them.

“So you’re…school friends?” she asks.

“Tom was the first person I met at school. He made a good impression.”

She’s being weird, and we both know it.

Amy catches my eye, and I wonder if she knows I went through her bag. Is this payback? Or is she just fooling around?

Mum leads her into the kitchen where Jay is working on his laptop and says, “Tom has a visitor.”

She practically sings it, and he stands and rubs Mum’s shoulders. “I can see that.”

Amy introduces herself again, and I’m jealous of her confidence. But, then, this isn’t unfamiliar territory. I wonder if, in a way, she feels like we’re guests in her house rather than the other way around.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Mum asks Amy.

“No, thank you.”

That’s not the answer Mum was expecting. There’s a faint ripple of panic in her cheeks before Jay says, “Perhaps we should leave them to it.”

“It’s fine,” I say, a bit too quickly. “Amy was telling Mum she used to live here. How weird is that?”

Jay tilts his head and says, “So how do you know each other?”

“I go to the same school, now,” Amy says. “I used to go to the—”

I turn to see what she’s looking at, and Nia’s in the doorway.

“We have a guest,” Mum says. But Amy isn’t smiling anymore.

She stares at Nia, growing paler by the second, until my stepsister catches her eye and says, “What’s this?”

I think of the photos that Amy haunted, the party that Nia was also at. They were almost as close as they are now.

Amy shrinks into herself, like she did the day we met, while Nia stares at her, then me, then back again.

“This is Amy,” I say, and my stepsister looks at her for a little too long.

“I should go,” Amy mumbles.

Mum looks worried, like she’s offended the first proper visitor I’ve ever had. But it’s not her. It’s Nia. And Amy’s not offended. She’s scared.