We got back in the car. Emma had her steak bake half gone before her seatbelt was on, and she dunked a corner of it in my coffee without asking, which is a thing she does, which I have stopped fighting, because the day she stops dunking things in my coffee is the day something has gone wrong between us.

We pulled off the motorway again twenty minutes later, and this time it was not for fuel.

I took us round the back of the services, past the lorry park, to the dead corner where the cameras do not reach and nobody walks. Black glass. Nobody could see in. I killed the engine and the rain that had been threatening since Birmingham came down soft on the roof.

She was already looking at me.

"We are going to be late for your mother," she said, and undid her own seatbelt.

"She raised me. She knows what I’m like."

That got the laugh, low in her throat, and then she was climbing over, a knee into the seat by my thigh, the other catching the gearstick so she swore and I caught her and lifted her clear of it.

She came down into my lap. I found the lever down the side of the seat and pulled it and the whole thing dropped flat and took us with it, her riding it down with a yelp, the wheel suddenly a foot over our heads.

Rain hammering the glass right above her. The windows already going. Nothing out there but dim shapes that could not see a thing.

She put her forehead to mine. Breathed me in a second. Then kissed me, and it was not a quick one.

"I love you," she said into it. "I’ve not said it once today and I’ve thought it four hundred times."

"You said it last night."

"That was last night." She kissed me again, smiling against my mouth. "Say it back or I’m walking."

"I love you. Come here."

She came.

I got both hands up the back of the hoodie, under the T-shirt, onto her bare skin, no bra since Dulwich, and dragged them up her spine. She arched. I brought them round the front and she lost the kiss on a sharp breath, her head going down to my shoulder.

"There she is."

"Don’t." Wrecked, into my neck. "Do that again."

I did. She shuddered and her hands went into my hair and she bit a sound off against my throat.

Then she sat up, hands flat on my chest, and looked down at me with the rain going overhead and nothing left in her face but want.

"Right," she said. "These are coming off."

She went for the waist of the joggers. I got there first, hooked my thumbs into them and the knickers both, and she lifted up onto her knees over me, hands braced on the roof, to let me take them down.

"Daniel."

"I’ve got you."

"I know." Barely there. "That’s the whole problem with you."

She came back down.

The windows did what windows do.

I will tell you the rain was still going when we got back on the motorway. I will tell you Emma redid her hair in the visor mirror with a look on her face like a woman who had got exactly what she came for. I will tell you we were a good while in that corner and not one second of it was spent buying anything. The rest is ours, and the country does not get it.

"Right," she said, pulling the hoodie straight, pink and pleased and not sorry in the slightest. "Now you can drive."

"You’re trouble, Emma."

"You proposed to it. On a Sunday. With a salt-bake." She put her feet back on the dash. "No takebacks."

Jessica rang outside Coventry and I put it on speaker, and Emma went quiet in the way she can, where she stops being the sharpest woman in the room and lets the other sharpest woman work.

"Walsh. Update, because I know you’re sat there pretending you’re not thinking about it."

"Go on, Jess."

"I have spent the morning being a nuisance to people who are not used to being made nuisances of, and it is working. I leaned on the right two, who leaned on the rest, and there is an emergency board meeting this afternoon. Today. Not next week. I want this decided by tomorrow morning and I have made that everyone’s problem but yours."

"Today. Bloody hell, Jess."

"That is what you pay me for, and you do not pay me enough, we’ll come to that another time."

I could hear her walking, heels on a hard floor, fast. "Parish is onside as a man and careful as a chairman, which is exactly what he should be, so do not ring him and do not help. You will only slow it down. Let me carry it. You drive."

"What’s the team," I said. "You’ve still not told me what country it is."

A pause. The heels stopped.

"I’m not saying it on a phone. Not till there’s ink. But I will tell you this much, because you’ve earned it and because it is the truth." Her voice did a thing it almost never does, went quiet and certain at the same time.

"It is the right one, Daniel. Of every job that could have rung this week, it is the one I would have walked over and put in your hand myself. It fits you. It fits the way you work, the players they’ve got, the mess they’re in, all of it. I have done this years and I do not get this feeling often and I am not wrong about it. When I finally tell you which one, you are going to go quiet, and then you are going to say my name like I have just read your mind."

I drove for a second without saying anything.

"That good," I said. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

"That good. Now stop asking, because I cannot, and go and see your mother, and tell her it’s going the right way without telling her what it is, which I know you are incapable of, so just hug her and say nothing." A beat.

"Congratulations on the ring, by the way. I picked a good one, didn’t I."

"You picked a good one, Jess."

Gone. No goodbye. Off Jessica, always.

Emma had been listening with her head back on the rest and her eyes half shut, and she did not open them.

"She’s terrifying," she said. "I want her at the wedding. I want her organising the wedding."

"She’d have it done by Friday."

"That’s why I want her." She turned her head and looked at me then. "It’s the right one. You heard her. She doesn’t talk like that, your Jessica. She talked like that."

"She did."

"So." Quiet, watching the first rain hit the glass. "It’s coming, then. A real yes or a real no, by tomorrow."

"Looks like."

"Good." She did not explain it and I did not ask. One more afternoon where it was still a maybe. That was all she wanted, and all I wanted, and we had it.

We stopped a third time past Stoke. Not for fuel, for food. She wanted a proper sit-down, not a forecourt pasty, so we came off and found a greasy spoon a mile off the motorway that was not on any map and did not know my face, two mugs of tea the colour of a conker and a fry each, and we sat in a vinyl booth in the window with her foot hooked round my ankle under the table.

And I had a look at us, for a second, from the outside.

A lass with a ring worth more than the café and a fella who had won three trophies in a season, sat in a caff off the A500 with brown sauce and a laminated menu and nobody in the world knowing where we were.

The happiest I have ever been sat anywhere. Not the trophies. This. A vinyl booth with the person who knew me before any of it, and a fry, and forty minutes of being no one.

"What," she said, catching me looking.

"You’ve got beans on your ring," I said, because I could not say the other thing in a caff.

She looked. She had. But she’d clocked the dodge, the way she clocks everything, and she put her chin back in her hand and looked at me, brown sauce at the corner of her mouth, four hours’ sleep under her eyes, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I have lifted a European cup over my head.

"You’re staring, Daniel."

"So are you."

"I know." She wiped the ring on a napkin, reached over and thumbed the sauce off the corner of my mouth without being asked, and stole a bit of my sausage with the same hand, shameless, grinning, and that was the forty minutes, and I’d have given it four hours.

Past Stoke the country finished its turning, the green gone hard and flat, the sky bigger and lower and greyer, the brick gone red, the accents in the radio adverts coming home. And my chest did the thing it always does on this last stretch, the thing it has done since I was a lad doing this drive on a coach with my boots in a bin bag. It tightened.

"You’ve gone quiet," Emma said, and put her hand on the back of my neck without being asked, the ring cool at my hairline. "Stoke. Every time. I know him, this quiet one. He’s only ever in this car."

She left her hand there and did not say another word, because she has done this drive enough times to know the quiet one needs leaving alone.

We came off onto the M60 and Manchester came up on the left, grey and low and massive, the cranes and the glass on top of all the old brick.

And somewhere down in the middle of it, eight miles and a whole different life from the green part where Emma learned to ride, was a street I know the cracks in, and a kettle older than I am, and a woman who had carried the biggest secret of my life for three weeks and would have the door open before the handbrake was up.

A World Cup was deciding what to do with me this afternoon, eight hundred miles away, round a table I would never see.

My mum was waiting at half twelve, behind a door I had walked through ten thousand times, with the dinner on.

Only one of those had me frightened, and it was not the World Cup.

"Right," I said, and put the indicator on for Moss Side. Emma took her feet off the dash, sat up, turned the radio down. Slid her hand off my neck and into mine.

"Come on," she said. "Let’s go and tell your mum she were right."

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.