"Me?" Ford asked in surprise. He was used to being the one always worrying about Cash's mental health and emotional wellbeing; it was odd to have the tables turned on him when Cash was the one grieving family members and acting weird and making strange comments about repeating themselves. When was the last time Cash had actually asked how Ford was doing? Really asked, not just in the superficial way people asked when they were saying hello. Not since they'd reconnected, Ford didn't think. He thought about when Cash had pulled him off to a private room at Black's and told him he had to be careful what he said, back when he'd been seeing Macnair. Was that the last time they'd actually talked about Ford's feelings? And even that wasn't something that Cash had sought out; Ford had made the comment (though now he didn't even remember what it had been), and Cash had just reacted to it.

So this was weird, and left him feeling off-balance. And was Ford sure he was alright? Not particularly — he had two new cousins to look after and he was running thin on likely Wellingtonshire addresses to burgle and neither Clem nor Grace were making any degree of progress towards marriage. But Ford wasn't going to say anything about any of that, because they didn't talk about his shit in conversations like these.

"If this is about that night I stopped by your house —" he began — because it had to be, he'd decided; there was nothing else that would have made Cash ask if he was alright. But fine, okay, that had been weird and he'd been acting weird but now he had some distance from it and could come up with better excuses, even if they were lies. "That was just —"

Ford glanced at the stone in his hand, struck by the feeling that he'd been just in the middle of saying something, but he couldn't think of what. "We don't have to talk about it," he said, with a shrug — if it was important it would come back to him. "But we should talk about something."

---