Rigo Charnwood had planned this weekend down to the ice: three cars, a shopping list with the quantities written on it, a playlist two weeks in the making, and a printed schedule nobody was ever going to follow except him.
By four in the afternoon the schedule was dead, the argument about the speaker was very much alive, and he was winning it.
“It is not coming inside,”
he said, for the third time.
“It goes on the terrace, or it goes back in Ianto's car and I tell everybody why.”
He had a drink up in one hand and his other hand out flat, mid-argument, when the engine cut in the driveway behind him.
He did not turn around. He put the drink down on the windowsill first, carefully, which he would later insist meant nothing at all.
Then he turned around.
You were standing at the open car door with one bag in your hand and the last of the light on everything, and the joke he had been carrying around all afternoon — the one he had built at the departure list, where your name was not — went straight out of his head.
“Nobody move,”
he said, far too loudly.
“Nobody say anything stupid. The prodigal is back, she brought exactly one bag, and somebody in this yard has clearly lost an argument.”