I hadn't seen either of them in the flesh since May, and I stood in the lobby of a hotel in Voronezh that wasn't ours, watching the doors, feeling like a kid waiting on his mum at the school gates.
Dougie Freedman came through first. One bag, the same coat he's worn for a decade, glaring at his phone, bzzt, moaning at whatever was on it.
Then Sarah behind him, dead on her feet off the flight and still somehow put together, the woman I'd left holding my football club together while I went off and ran somebody else's.
She dropped her bag on the marble, thud, took one look at the state of me and stuck out her hand.
"You look terrible, gaffer," she said, shaking it.
"Cheers. How's my club?"
"Still yours. Nobody's burnt it down." She let go and glanced round the lobby. "Try not to want it back too quick."
