[23:31 CEST.]
The families had come through the gate at the corner flag. Kids in oversized shirts chasing confetti. Iza steering Mateo across the grass at crutch speed with one hand on his back. Aaron's old man with the Telegraph clipping framed in his hallway, stood on a European pitch in his good coat, not knowing where to put his hands.
And Emma, at the front of it, my old Macron jacket thrown over a dress with the sleeves shoved up, her hair wrecked from ninety minutes of screaming and her colour up, and in the middle of fifty-six thousand people she looked like the only one in France worth looking at.
She did not say a word. She got two fists in the front of my shirt, pulled me down, and kissed me, the kind you feel in your teeth, and for about four seconds I forgot the trophy and the cameras and the whole continent and thought about one thing only, which was getting her somewhere with a door that locked.
She felt me think it. She always feels me think it.
