Now. The car.
We took the big Mercedes, the quiet one, the long low diesel Jessica made me buy the day I went in for something yellow.
The DB11 stopped in the garage where it belongs. An Aston is a glorious thing for an hour of Surrey on a Sunday and a punishment for a day up the spine of England, all noise and temper and no patience, and a man does not take a car that wants a fight when he is driving the woman he loves four hours north to tell his mother he is getting married.
You take the quiet one. You take the one she will actually sit in.
Black glass on the back, the fronts done dark enough that nobody clocked who was driving it on a Monday school run.
Two and a half tonnes of hushed German money with a roof you could see the sky through and a stereo Emma had named. She calls it Brian. Seven years off the till at the shop on Princess Road and here I was telling a car called Brian to take me home.
