The phone did not stop the whole way home and for once I let it.
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
Green light up the inside of the car every couple of seconds. I gave in at the lights on the South Circular, looked, and laughed out loud in a parked car like a madman. The country had lost its mind over two words on a black screen and I had done it on purpose.
The box was still in my coat.
I kept the hand drifting up to it at every red, just to check. Small heavy weight against my chest. Only thing keeping my feet on the ground all the way home. Without it I would have been ten feet over the rooftops, the lot of me, whoosh, gone.
I pulled up under the building. Cut the engine. Tink, tink, tink off the bonnet as it cooled.
Some ex-Arsenal lad gone pundit had been on the radio inside the hour. Emma had clipped it and sent it across. No message, just the link, which was how I knew it was good. Forty seconds of a professional adult genuinely upset about two words on a screen.
