"Even when you joke about it, it's there. It's always there, gnawing at you," I said.

He looked away, tilting his head. "Let's see… two eggs, sunny-side, hash browns…"

"Some days are worse than others," I pressed. "Some days, you feel so empty it actually hurts."

He flashed that Bishop smile again, but said nothing.

"Maybe you light up a joint and get yourself two, three hours of relief. It never lasts. You've tried cutting yourself, biting yourself, pulling out your hair, probably making yourself vomit now and then, to start feeling something. Anything. Nothing works."

Billy's expression shifted a few degrees away from mockery, toward uneasiness.

I kept burrowing. "There are times you feel so much dead space inside, such a cold, black hole, that you wonder whether you even exist. You look around at other people and wonder if they're real. Maybe they're just pretending to be alive, too."

He shook his head, squinted at me. "How much is my father paying you for this crap?" he asked.

"He's not paying me," I said.

"Then you're an idiot," he said.

"Why's that?"

"Because," he said, "you're doing exactly what he wants you to do. You may as well cash in."

"He's projecting" the voice at the back of my mind interjected. "He's the one who feels bought and paid for."

I listened to that voice and decided to reflect Billy's comment back onto whatever fragile part of his psyche it had come from. "Your dad owns you, champ," I said, "not me."

His face lost every trace of gaminess. "No one owns me," he said, a new loathing creeping into his tone.

I had struck a nerve. I wanted to follow it toward its root. "The way I understand it, you're bought and paid for, buddy."

"Wrong, Sigmund." His face flushed.

"F.O.B. Moscow," I said.

His upper lip started to twitch.

"And now," I said, "it looks like your dad's finally convinced you're damaged goods. He's cutting his losses."

Billy shrugged, but the movement looked weak and artificial. He knew he couldn't shrug me off. "Leave," he said, his voice thin with rage. "Get out." He stood up. He was nearly six feet tall. The muscles in his arms were ropy and tight. His hands were balled into fists.

I wasn't about to back down. Not when we were getting closer to the truth. "I'm not ready to leave," I said.

He took a step toward me.

I instinctively focused on the point where I would plant the ball of my foot to drop him if he lunged at me-just where his ribs met, at the lowest point of his sternum. "Why can't you admit it?" I prodded. "All you cost Win Bishop was a one-way ticket."

He took another step. "I've cost him a lot more…" he sputtered, then stopped himself short.

A new quiet filled the room-the pure silence that heralds the arrival of the truth.

"Tell me," I said. "Just how angry are you at your father?"

He stared at me for a few moments, as if he might answer, but then took a deep breath, spread his fingers wide, and stepped back toward his bed.

"You're mad enough to take it out on a few cats, from what I heard." I shook my head. "I love cats, by the way."

"You heard what you heard," he said.

"Mad enough to try burning his house down."

"If I had wanted to burn his house down," he said, "it would be gone."

"But none of that was enough," I continued. "So you moved on to your baby sister, Brooke. You had to cost him a child. One of his real children."

He looked away from me, toward the room's single, grated window. With the light falling on his face, he suddenly looked more like a lost boy than a violent young man.

"I think I get it," I said, not letting up. "It's the old cliché: 'Misery loves company.' You're so dead inside that you feel a little better watching the life drain out of something else. And you're not brave enough to go after your father-who you'd really like to kill-so you pick on things that can't fight back. Kittens, babies, real brave stuff like that." I got up. "I don't need to hear anything else." I walked to the door and opened it.

"You don't know the first thing about me," he seethed. "Or my father."

"Let him tell you the first thing" the voice at the back of my mind said.

My skin turned to gooseflesh. A crown of shivers made my scalp tingle. Billy seemed about to invite me into his suffering. And I have never felt closer to God than when journeying into a damaged heart. I pushed the door to the room closed again and slowly turned to face him.

"I'll let you in on a little secret," Billy deadpanned. He pulled his shirt off, tossed it on his bed, and stood there, the taut muscles of his chest and abdomen twitching.

I wondered if he was baiting me while he gathered the courage to rush me. I shifted most of my weight to my left side, freeing up my right foot in case I needed to deliver the blow I had planned. But all Billy did was turn around. And that was enough to make me nearly lose my balance. Because I saw that his back was covered with welts, from his shoulder blades to his waist, as if he had been savaged with a strap. Some were raw and open. Others had healed into thick scars.

"If you want to figure out what happened to little Brooke," Billy said, "maybe you should figure out why good old Win gets off on doing this to me."

My head was spinning. I tried to picture Darwin Bishop wielding a strap as Billy cowered in a corner of the family's Nantucket mansion, but my mind kept serving up my father, in the tenement house we called home. His belt was black, two inches wide, thirty-eight inches long, with a square, brushed silver buckle. He wore it every day, whether he was drunk or not, which left me with a tinge of terror even when he was sober and kind and picking me off my feet with a bear hug, telling me how much he loved me. Standing there with Billy, I could actually smell the stench of alcohol that came off my father's skin. I could feel the mixture of nausea and fear that I lived with until I had lived long enough to get myself out of that house and out of his way.

"Your father did that?" I quietly asked Billy.

He didn't respond. But his scarred shoulders seemed to sag under the weight of his revelation.

I walked closer to him and reached out, almost touching his back. I let my hand fall. "When?" I said.

He turned around, the fake smile back on his face. "Whenever he feels like it," he said. "When I got to this country, I tried being good, because I thought I might get sent back to the orphanage, but he seemed to like punishing me, anyhow, especially when he'd had a little bit to drink, so I figured, Why try to please him? Why give a fuck-about anyone?" He shrugged. "Then something strange happened," he said.

"What was that?" I asked.

"It stopped hurting," he said, simply. "He could whip me as hard as he wanted, and it didn't get to me."

"Is that when you started to hurt yourself? The biting?"

He turned his arms over, revealing more arc-shaped scars here and there on the undersides of his forearms. "It felt good for a while," he said.

"It felt good?"

"Well, I could feel it. And that was good. You know?"

I did know. "The cats? The house?" I said. "Talk to me about those."

He sat on the edge of his mattress, looking away. "I don't know why I did that stuff," he said. "Maybe it was what you were saying before, how I wanted to hurt something or destroy something because I was feeling destroyed myself. Maybe I wanted to see them suffer. Maybe because I couldn't, anymore. I don't know. I'm all mixed up about it." He looked at me. His eyes were filled with worry. "I'm not right in the head. I'm not… normal. I never will be."

I didn't want to get distracted by how badly I felt for Billy. I needed more information. "What about Brooke?" I said. "Be straight with me. I'll try to help you either way. Are you the one who killed her, or not?"