13. The Money

At the Marshal's Office she had, briefly, seen Raylan.

Phones ringing, a hum of voices, people walking with a contained rush and then his slow stride towards her and a look on his face that said I told you so but he didn't actually say the words. They had stood and looked at each other and she had remembered a time - not so long ago - when all she had wanted was to find shelter in his arms.

He didn't say what was written in his face but after a moment and his eyes had lost a little of their hardness he had said:

'Are you okay?'

'I'm fine.' Her answer had come a little too loudly. Across the wide space where Boyd had been standing with the FBI or ATF or whatever the hell they were, his head had raised and his eyes found hers and she had known that he would give up everything they had agreed on at the thought that something had upset her.

'I'm fine,' she had repeated, softer, looking past Raylan's shoulder.

When she had looked at him again, Raylan was frowning and had leant towards her a little, like this was a question that was so important that no-one else should hear it.

'Why haven't you thrown him out before now?'

'He has a good heart.'

His head had tilted back then, his eyes narrowing to slits and a look of amusement, condescension had marred his features. 'You're going to bet your life on the state of Boyd Crowder's heart?'

She had met the gaze, steel in her resolve. 'Seems to me you've done just that before now.' She thinks about the woods on her own account and the mine on his. 'Besides, he ain't never lied to me.'

He had stiffened then and she'd turned away before he could say anything else.

Now, back in her house, they sit across from each other at her kitchen table and stare at the money. A little over twenty-three-thousand, and it's just a pile of paper. It had been well after dawn when they'd finally left Lexington, coming closer to noon by the time she'd retrieved the holdall from her bedroom closet where she'd hidden it under a pile of shoes and a bolt of berry-red fabric.

She should really have gone straight into work but she's allowing herself the luxury of a day off; normally such a thought would be followed by one about the money she'll be losing but now there is this, this offering, a cushion against the usual fear.

She pours another shot of bourbon into their coffee - they've been up all night so it doesn't count as drinking in the morning; and it's breaking her no-liquor-in-the-house rule but it was already there, and they've broken a whole bunch of others anyhow.

'Damn,' she says, looking at the neatly-stacked green bills. Benjamin Franklin looks back and he looks slightly amused; she's always thought he'd have been a lecher and she thinks it now more than ever. Another mouthful of coffee and she feels the sweet burn against her tongue, the fuzzy haze of alcohol rising through her head. 'Y'know, there's a part of me that thinks: screw the mortgage, just take the money and run.'

He rouses himself, blinks, looks at her and one corner of his mouth turns up. 'Where would you run to, Ava?'

She catches a breath. 'I used to think about Costa Rica.' A wry smile. 'I had a list once.'

He doesn't ask why she talks about it in the past tense.

'Where would you go in this big old world, Boyd?'

There is a pause and she can see the torrent behind his eyes. He sighs. 'There are still so many places I ain't seen in the States.' His fingers play with the handle of his mug and she watches their careless, delicate precision. 'I had a buddy who used to talk about this place out in Jordan - Petra, this city carved out of the rocks. He loved it out there in the desert, all them flat plains. I couldn't take it but he loved it. We used to talk about it, though, going to Petra, see that old city.'

A pause.

'Why didn't you?'

His chest rises and is still and then falls. 'Well, he stepped on a landmine during a night patrol. He wasn't killed outright but he died the next day. I couldn't really see it after that.'

It's the first time she's ever heard him talk, even in passing, about Kuwait. She remembers when he came back, how thin he had been, his face hollow and haunted and hunted and a gaze that never seemed to quite focus, like he was still seeing things long past.

'Why did you go out there?' she asks, quiet, something she's always wondered and now seems like the one time to ask. After a few long moments he says:

'It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.'

'And was it?'

More moments; he shakes his head slowly. 'I don't know.'

They sit, drink the coffee sweetened with sugar and bourbon and the choices that have bound them to this moment.

'Colorado,' he says suddenly.

'What?'

'I'd like to see Colorado. The mountains. I like mountains,' he adds, as though this explains everything.

She studies him, the seriousness of his expression and starts to laugh. Exhaustion, she tells herself, and tries to stop it but her shoulders keep shaking.

He doesn't seem offended by her amusement: he smiles. He has a nice smile and it would be nice, she thinks, to see it more often.

She thinks it would be nice if she smiled more often.

Ava scrubs at her eyes, feels the leaden weight in her limbs and decides she should get some sleep. The stairs seem far away and her room at the top of them even further; she forces her unwilling body to stand. Boyd remains sitting and he looks worse than she feels, for all sorts of reasons.

But out of all of it the thing that bothers her the most, the thing she kept thinking about back at the Marshal's Office, is the idea that part of him wanted to crawl into that hole and never come back out.

She stops beside his chair, raises a hand and it hovers in the air for a moment before she rests her fingertips lightly on his shoulder. His eyes move to the point of contact, then travel slowly up: along her hand, her wrist, following the line of her arm, the curve of her neck, up to her face.

There are a lot things she wants to say but, unlike him, she doesn't have all the right words, so she settles on the thing that feels the most important, the one thing she really needs to tell him. 'I ain't up on the morals of all this. I don't know if you did the right thing in the wrong way, or the wrong thing in the right way and, honestly, I don't know how much it matters. You saved that man's life, you saved my house, you got rid of the bad guys - that has to be worth something. And-' She tilts her head, looking down at him. 'And I guess I'm saying thanks.'

He stares up at her and it's like a kaleidoscope - all the same pieces but they shift and the picture is subtly, entirely different. His smile and his voice are soft. 'Well, you're very welcome, Ava.'