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has a life plan got to do with us being stuck in a rut?’ He gestured with his kebab, another stream of juice starting to coat his fingers.

      She had to stop staring. She shook her head. Life plan. That is what she needed to think about.

      She swallowed her mouthful of kebab. How many times had she had this conversation with him?

      ‘Okay, you map out your life, right. Break it down first by year. Then work out where the big milestones are going to be. When you want to be promoted at work, when you want to get married, when you want to have kids, that sort of thing. Then you make sure that you put in month by month all the stuff you need to do to get to achieve it.’

      Why didn’t he get that it was as simple as that? Everything plotted out.

      ‘So, you’re telling me you have a calendar entry for September 3^rd that says “Netflix and takeout with Gee”? Because that is weird and slightly scary. And I’m not sure how that adds up to you getting your life plan done?’

      He put his feet up on the large battered coffee table and actually started eating his kebab instead of waving it around.

      ‘No, it isn’t that detailed. Well, only in places.’ Was he seriously asking this? Maybe he wanted to make it up to her since their earlier fight about her job.

      If only she could get him to understand. She put her kebab down, wiped her fingers with a napkin, because she wasn’t a savage, and picked up her phone so she could illustrate her points.

      ‘See, at the moment I’m in my career growth period.’ She waved the graphs on the Google doc that she checked every morning and updated weekly at him. ‘All social events that I go to need to be focused towards growing my professional network or be somehow related to work. Anything else would be a waste of time and energy. But if we move forward to next year, that is the beginning of my professional and personal period. I’ll start having to go out socially, I’ll probably join a dating service. Then after a period of three months, I should find Mr Right. I give it another six months before we move in, then engaged a year after that…’

      She looked up.

      Gee was staring at her with his mouth open, his kebab halted halfway to it.

Chapter Six

      ‘What?’ Surely, she’d told him this before?

      ‘I knew you had a plan, but I…’ He looked like she’d hit him. ‘But what happens if you fall in love before that? Or you don’t find the right person at the right time?’

      She clicked her phone shut. As if that would happen.

      ‘It will be fine, I’ll make sure I don’t fall in love before then, it’s just a matter of will power. I haven’t been in love, so I can’t see why it should change this year. And I’ll find the right person. I have a list. I’ve told you, it is a matter of planning for these things.’

      Why was Gee looking at her like that? As if she’d not only mis-shelved his books but she’d changed all the faders and knobs on his production board in the studio.

      ‘What?’ she asked.

      ‘Nothing,’ he said quietly.

      She picked up the remote control.

      ‘Ready?’ she asked.

      ‘Erm… okay,’ Gee said.

      As the frozen face of Austen Wentworth sprang to life, she could feel Gee staring at her for a few moments. She stopped herself from turning to see why, her shoulders tense till eventually she felt him turn to watch the screen.

      ***

      ‘No, Mum, I’m doing Christmas at home this year. I told you back in March. You said that you were okay if we shared the day with Dad and Janice. You know, because Boopsie is with her dad.’ Emma carried on typing on her laptop, with her headphones plugged into her phone as she spoke to her mum.

      ‘But… Derek and I have just decided that we want to do the Alps this year.’ Her mum sounded on the edge of tears.

      Emma closed her eyes briefly. Lord give her strength. She knew it was rude to feel this way if your mum was on the verge of crying but her mum’s default setting was tears. If they showed the Dog’s Trust advert on the telly, if she didn’t get her own way, or even if they were down to the last inch of milk. Permanently lachrymose. As a child it had been like living with a leaky tap.

      And this supposed trip to the Alps for Christmas wasn’t anything but hot air, Emma knew. She wondered what programme her mum had been watching to get the idea. She still woke up in a cold sweat thinking about one of the few times her mum had actually followed through on a plan, well, half a plan. They’d flown to India for Christmas when she was ten, and her mum had forgotten the small issue of a visa. Only for Emma though – her mum and dad had been fine.

      And people wondered why she was overly pernickety with plans. When you’ve spent Christmas Day on your own on the floor of an airport immigration office because your parents decided to do a bit of sightseeing while they waited for you to be deported, you double and triple checked everything.

      And stopped believing in Father Christmas.

      She was probably worrying without reason, it wasn’t as if they would have booked anything. The India trip was a mere blip in broken promises. With hindsight, she realised it must have been their last-ditch attempt at staying together. By the following Christmas she had two houses to spend the big day at, but neither were a home.

      Now she had a home, they would all be sat around the dining room table on Christmas Day no matter what Mum said. She knew after everything they had done, or rather, not done, she should cut them loose like they had her. She’d made her own home and living her perfect version of life meant that you didn’t ditch your family. Just because they’d done that to her didn’t mean she should do it to them.

      And if that meant an uncomfortable Christmas Day, then so be it. She could get through anything if she had a plan. If she choreographed her time with Mum and Dad and their partners then they were less likely to crash into her life unexpectedly and bring her carefully constructed world tumbling down. At least she could avoid her stepsister, Boopsie, this year. She was sure that Gee was one step away from getting a restraining order for her.

      ‘But Ems…’ Mum was whining wetly.

      A calendar alert pinged up.

      Her meeting with her boss, actually her boss’s boss, Malcolm McKee, the head of Mega! Management.

      She could feel her heart racing. Ever since the meeting had gone in her diary two days ago she had tried to keep her cool. It had to be good news. It had to be.

      You didn’t get called into McKee’s office for anything but one of two things: a step jump in your career, or alternatively a drop kick of your job and reputation onto the street.

      ‘Sorry Mum, I have a meeting,’ she interrupted.

      ‘But we still haven’t decided on…’ her mum wailed.

      ‘I’ll call you back on Sunday as usual and we can talk through the Alps trip,’ she promised, not even bothering to cross her fingers while telling the lie. Because it wasn’t a complete fabrication. They would discuss it, with Emma telling her how much organising and money it took to plan the kind of trip her mum had in mind. It would take merely minutes to get her mum to come around to her way of thinking. And they would all be having Christmas at hers, exactly the way she had planned it back in the spring.

      Sometimes she wondered why people didn’t just go along with her in the first place. It wasted so much energy when they always ended up doing it anyway.

      ‘Bye Mum.’ She absentmindedly blew a kiss, clicked off the call and pulled out her headphones.

      ‘Are you ready?’ Jamie swung his chair round,

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