A moment after the knock on the door, I'm standing by it, listening. It's quiet outside. Sensing a movement behind me, I look back to find Joshua with a rifle in his hands. I have all but forgotten about his intentions to sneak firearms into the room, and it's a relief that he'd acted on that, likely while I was showering. He holds it as if he knows how to use it, too, which is more than I can say about myself. I look at him with newly found respect.

"Yes?" he says, moving to stand by the door. I move to the other side of it, looking around for something I could use as a weapon, but there's nothing save for the chair that I could perhaps swing like a club.

From behind the door comes the voice of Joshua's father. His pronunciation is not very sharp, so I have no idea what he's saying. Apparently, Joshua does understand, though, for he lowers the rifle and turns the door handle.

I wince, half-expecting for the door to be kicked open and for a bunch of white-clad people to barge in. Yet it only opens a bit, and Joshua looks out through the crack.

"Thank you," he says, accepting something with one hand while handing me the rifle with the other, apparently not wanting for his father to see it. "You did find enough?"

There's a grunt of confirmation, and then something that sounds suspiciously like 'get lost'.

"First thing tomorrow morning," Joshua says before shutting the door again. Then he turns and shows me a package wrapped in a few plastic bags.

"Let me introduce to you," he says, "our starting capital."

He walks over to the window, unwrapping the package. I watch him retrieve a few bundles of cash from the plastic bag and place them one next to another on the sill. His hands look ghostly pale in the moonlight.

I reach out and pick a bundle. It consists of twenty-dollars bills, perhaps a hundred of them judging by how thick the bundle is. Joshua picks another bundle and shows it to me. The number on the top bill is '100'.

"Holy crap," I say. "There're thousands here."

"All in all, should be about ten thousand." He nods and smiles and then starts wrapping the money back into the bag. "As you can see, I'm not the only one person in my family who likes to keep his cash at home."

"Keeping it is one thing, but giving it to you is something different. He must love you a great deal to lend you so much."

"Love has nothing to do with it." He gestures at me with the newly wrapped plastic bag before getting up and walking to his bed. "A little bit of blackmail works miracles." Bending, he places the money under the bed, and then sits down on the sheets, stretching.

I stare at him. "Are you saying you blackmailed a sick, old man?" I come over and stand next to him. "Seriously? How?"

"Just mentioned that I might start talking to people about his educational techniques and stuff."

I blink at him, the gears of my tired brain working slowly.

"Did you beat you or something?"

He frowns. "Beat me? Oh no. Daddy was never violent."

"Then what?" The room is warm, yet I feel chilled as the guesses come, overflowing my mind, with one of them looming dark and ominous over the rest. "Did he...molest you?"

He looks at me for a while, his face a pale oval in the dark.

"Define 'molest'?" he says at last.

"Oh no, Joshua," I say and then I sit next to him and draw him into a hug, equally surprising both of us.

The image of the man with the walkers gains an ominous tinge in my mind's eye. The way he looked at Joshua, the few words he used, his obvious distaste for our presence and the confusing unwillingness to express it out loud. When he saw Joshua, it wasn't love of affection that he felt. It was fear.

"The bastard," I say, letting go of him and getting up to my feet. "Why didn't you tell me? Just to think that I was acting nice to him. I'll show him now."

"Sit down." He grabs my T-shirt and pulls so that I plop back onto the bed. "What're you going to do—attack a sick, old man? The past is the past. At least it gave us some leverage over him, and now we have the money."

"But you can't just let it slide. I he did something to you—I mean if he—"

"He's never lay a finger on me, if that's what you have in mind."

I stare, confused. "But you said..."

"Damn, Ethan." He rubs his face. "Do we have to?"

"Yes," I say. "We're in this together, so yes, I'd like to know."

He moves away and sits with his legs crossed, facing me. Then he reaches to grab a pillow and puts it in front of him like a shield.

"He was...okay, at first," he says. "Kind of a silent, surly type. When I and Mom moved in, he barely noticed me at all, but I preferred it that way. She had switched quite a few boyfriends, and some of them had noticed me more than I'd preferred, so he was fine, by comparison. I guess she thought so, too, when she decided to take off without notifying either of us. Probably thought she was leaving me in good hands. I was twelve and I could work on the farm so I guess she assumed he wouldn't kick me out."

He pauses and I nod, encouraging him to continue.

"He didn't kick me out." He sighs and rubs his face again. "But he did start to notice me."

"How?"

"Like, he would look. He would walk into my room when I was getting dressed and just watch me. I would ask him—what do you want?—and he would just say—nothing, mind your own business. Sometimes he would walk into the bathroom when I showered. At first, he made it look like he needed to use the toilet, but then he dropped the pretense and just stood and watched. I started to lock the door—there had been no need before for that—but he removed the locks, both in my room and in the bathroom. He hadn't said anything, I just discovered one day that the locks disappeared and he could walk in on me any time. Sometimes I woke up to find him sitting there, staring—mostly in summers, when I slept in my underwear. It was creepy."

"Did you talk to him about it?"

"At first, yes, and he was like—it's my house, so I can walk wherever I want whenever I want. If you don't like it, you can just leave. And I didn't want to leave, you know? To go to some children's home, or foster care, or whatever? I had a roof over my head, and food, and clothes. I did feel thankful for that. It's not like he did anything to me. He just liked to see me naked. Maybe he imagined that I was Mom, because I did look like her. He didn't get another girlfriend—frankly, I'm surprised he even had attracted Mom in the first place. Maybe he was secretly gay, or a pedophile, I don't know, but he never acted upon it, at least not with me."

"Didn't stalking you like that count as acting upon it?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know. It kind of messed with my head, you know, because he never really did anything, and I felt sometimes like I was making too big a deal out of it. In some families, people walk naked in front of each other, and it's nothing. Maybe I was just too sensitive. I just felt his eyes on me all the time. Sometimes I thought that maybe I was provoking him, so I tried to wear baggy clothes, you know, to show as little skin as possible, to discourage him. Yet it didn't help. He would still walk in to watch me change or shower." He shivers. "I just felt so...wrong, and yet nothing was really happening. Sometimes I almost wished that he would do something and then I would know for sure he was in the wrongs, and I wasn't overreacting."

"But he never did?"

"Never." He shakes his head. "I do think that he touched himself sometimes—a few times as I was showering, he told me not to look, and I think he masturbated, judging by the sounds." He gives a one shoulder shrug. "Once again, I didn't look, so I don't know. All those years I have spent with him just feel like some confusing blotch in my memory. Like, I'm not sure what it was, and what of if I have possibly imagined. I could never quite tell if he was a perv or I was making a big deal out of an innocent quirk. Some of my classmates had fathers who beat them, or acted mean in other ways. Mine was fine. He just liked to see me shower, or change, or sleep naked in the summer. Was it that bad?"

"Yes," I say. "It sounds pretty bad."

He pierces his lips and nods, looking thoughtful.

"I know," he says after a pause. "After I moved out, I started to see it. With time and distance between us, I could see that he was a weirdo and there was nothing wrong with me hating his guts. But it doesn't matter anymore." He spreads his hands. "You can see now why he agreed when I asked for some money in exchange for me keeping our little family secret. And why not keep it?" He smiles, but it looks anything but cheerful. "How do you say? Leaving your family is one thing but selling them to police is quite another."