"Major."
"Yes, James."
They could see their breath.
"I thought this would end another way."
"I imagine you did," Major Burke said.
"I did." Scanlon sighed. "I expected dew on my feet." He looked down. That had come true enough: his boots were black at the toes. "And a bullet to the head."
"No," said Burke. "You didn't turn out the way I expected."
Scanlon started over. "I'm alive," he said. "I didn't have a plan for that."
"You had a plan for being dead?" Burke sounded skeptical.
"Oh, yes," Scanlon smiled. "That was much easier. Death? That would have been very straightforward. Like flicking a light switch."
"Well," Burke said, "you're alive. And Claire is alive. Because of you. And me, I'm alive. Because you disobeyed my orders." Amos didn't have the rhetoric to go on. It had been a tiring drive, even if they hadn't come that far at all from Belfast, up here to past Dundalk, just before the border. They were off the Newry road. "You understand."
"Sure," Jimmy said warmly as he looked around. Eager to get off. There was a hill just south, between the Armagh and Newry roads. It took you inside the nation of Éire, constituted under that name in 1937, just four years before.
Or you could leg off up a trout stream. That's what marked the border here. The north bank fished Protestant. The south bank, Catholic.
"You have the rest of your time to figure it out," Burke said. "Claire and I will raise a toast to you more than once, Sergeant. On our anniversary maybe. Have a good life now.”
"Thank you." Simply that.