The Plus-One Agreement by Charlotte Phillips

she said at last. ‘They’re my family.’
    ‘You mean you care about them?’
    ‘Of course I do. I’ve kind of got used to the criticism in a way. It’s who they are. They might be a nightmare, but at least they’re mine.’
    ‘And there’s your answer.’
    She shook her head faintly at him.
    ‘To what?’
    ‘You were wondering why I never mention or see my family. There’s your answer. That’s the difference between you and me. I don’t really have a family—not as such. And what I did have of one was never remotely interested in me, even in a critical way.’
    * * *
    She dropped her eyes from his.
    ‘Look, I’m sorry...’ she began.
    He smiled at her.
    ‘Don’t be. I’m fine with it. It’s always been that way. I don’t need a family, Emma. What you don’t have you don’t miss. When I was a kid we didn’t do overbearing parents or criticism or sibling rivalry.’ He paused. ‘We didn’t actually do family.’
    His mind waved the memory of Maggie before him again with a flourish and he clenched his teeth hard. Talking about family with Emma wasn’t so difficult when it related to his mother. His feelings for her had progressed over the years to end up somewhere near contempt. But family as related to Maggie meant something completely different. That had been his hope. That had been their plan. Losing that planned future had somehow been so much worse than losing any excuse for a family he might have had in the past.
    She was staring at him. He could feel it. He stood up, began walking back to the terrace, deliberately not looking at her.
    ‘What do you mean, you didn’t do family?’ she said, catching him up, her long skirt caught in one hand.
    He thought fleetingly about simply closing the conversation down, but found that on some level he didn’t want to. When had he last talked his childhood over with anyone? His usual conquests were happy to go along with however much he told them about himself—or, more to the point, however little. There had never been any need to give much away. Dinner and a cocktail or two seemed to be all that was needed to get to first base, quickly followed by second and third.
    ‘Exactly that,’ he said. ‘My upbringing wasn’t in a nice suburban house with a mum and dad, siblings, pets. Out of all those things some of the time I had a mum.’
    ‘What about your dad?’
    ‘I’ve never known him.’
    The look of sympathy on her face was immediate and he instantly brushed it away with a wave of his hand.
    ‘I’ve never needed to know him. It’s no big deal.’
    It was a billion times easier to talk about the family he’d actually had than the one he’d wanted and lost. The two things were worlds apart in his mind.
    ‘Yes, it is. That’s awful.’
    He shrugged.
    ‘What about your mum, then? You must have been close if it was just the two of you.’
    He could feel his lip trying to give a cynical curl.
    ‘Not especially. She wasn’t exactly Mother of the Year.’ He caught sight of her wide-eyed look and qualified resignedly, ‘Oh, hell, she was very young. It can’t have been easy, raising a kid by herself. It just was what it was.’
    Maggie flashed through his mind again. They’d been young, too, and totally unprepared for parenthood. But walking away had never been an option for him. He’d known that from the very first moment she’d told him about her pregnancy.
    ‘She worked on and off,’ he said. ‘Bar work, mostly. When I was smaller I used to stay with a neighbour, or one or other of her friends. There was never any consistency to it. Then when I got older it was just me.’
    He paused for a second, because that couple of sentences didn’t really sum up what it had felt like in that house by himself. It had been cold, with a musty smell of damp that had never gone away, even in the summer. Never tidy. Ready meals and late-night movies because no one cared if he stayed up late or if he was getting enough sleep for school. Sometimes