“You’re asking me to tell you something no one knows. Not because it’s so horrible—I know I’m not the only one who’s had a few challenges along the way. But it’s dead and buried. You want me to bring it back to life? Isn’t that what Slater’s trying to do?”

“I’m not Slater. And frankly, it doesn’t sound dead and buried to me.”

“And you really think this whole game has to do with my past?”

She nodded. “I’m assuming that Slater has an objective that is tied to your past, yes.”

Kevin remained quiet. The silence stretched, and Jennifer sat beside him feeling his tension, hearing his breathing. She wondered if it would be appropriate to put a hand on his arm but immediately decided it wouldn’t.

He suddenly groaned and rocked. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“You can’t slay the dragon without luring it out of its hole. I want to help you, Kevin. I need to know.”

For a long time he just sat there rocking. Then he stilled and his breathing slowed. Maybe it was too much too fast. He’d faced more than most could stomach these last three days and she was pushing him even further. He needed sleep. But she was running out of time. Slater was escalating.

She was about to suggest that they get some rest and consider it in the morning when he turned his face to the night sky.

“I don’t think Balinda’s intentions were necessarily evil.” He spoke in a soft monotone. “She wanted a good playmate for Bob. He was eight when they adopted me; I was one. But Bob was retarded. I wasn’t, and Balinda couldn’t accept that reality.”

He paused and took several deep breaths. Jennifer shifted and leaned on her arm so that she could watch his face. His eyes were closed.

“Tell me about Balinda.”

“I don’t know her story, but Balinda creates her own reality. We all do, but Balinda only knows absolutes. She decides what part of the world is real and what part isn’t. If something isn’t real, she makes it go away. She manipulates everything around her to create an acceptable reality.”

He stopped. Jennifer waited a full thirty seconds before prodding him. “Tell me what it was like to be her son.”

“I don’t know it yet, because I’m too young, but my mom doesn’t want me to be smarter than my brother. So she decides to make me retarded too because she’s already tried to make Bob smarter but she can’t.”

Another stall. He was switching tenses, dipping into the past. Jennifer felt her stomach turn.

“How does she do that? Does she hurt you?”

“No. Hurting is evil in Balinda’s world. She won’t let me out of the house because the world outside isn’t real. The only real world is the one she makes inside the house. She is the princess. She needs me to read so that she can shape my mind with what she makes me read, but she cuts up stories and makes me read only things she decides are real. I’m nine years old before I know there are animals called cats because Princess thinks cats are evil. I don’t even know there is evil until I’m eleven. There’s only real and unreal. Everything real is good and everything good comes from Princess. I don’t do anything bad; I only do things that aren’t real. She makes the things that aren’t real go away by starving me of them. She never punishes me; she only helps me.”

“When you do something that’s not real, how does she punish you?”

He hesitated. “She locks me in my room to learn about the real world or makes me sleep so I’ll forget the unreal world. She takes away food and water. That’s how animals learn, she says, and we are the best animals. I can remember the first time because it made me confused. I was four. My brother and I are playing servant, folding dishtowels for Princess. We have to fold them over and over until they’re perfect. Sometimes it takes all day. We don’t have toys because toys aren’t real. Bob asks me what one plus one is because he wants to give me two towels, but he doesn’t know what to call it. I tell him that I think one plus one is two and Princess overhears me. She locks me in my room for two days. Two towels, two days. If Bob doesn’t know how to add, then I can’t either, because it isn’t real. She wants me to be dumb like Bob.”

An image of Balinda seated under a stack of clipped newspapers filled Jennifer’s mind and she shivered.

Kevin sighed and changed tenses again. “She never held me. She hardly even touched me unless it was by mistake. Sometimes I went without food for days. Once a whole week. Sometimes we couldn’t wear clothes if we did unreal things. She deprived us both of anything she thought might feed our minds. Mostly me, because Bob was retarded and he didn’t do as many things that weren’t real. No school. No games. Sometimes no talking for days. Sometimes she made me stay in bed all day. Other times she made me sit in the bathtub in cold water so I couldn’t sleep all night. I could never ask her why, because that wasn’t real. Princess was real, and if she decided to do something, anything else was unreal and couldn’t be talked about. So we couldn’t ask questions. Even questions about real things, because that would question their reality, which was unreal.”

Jennifer filled in the blanks. The abuse wasn’t primarily physical, not necessarily even emotional, although there was some of both of those. It was primarily psychological. She watched Kevin’s chest rise and fall. She desperately wanted to reach out to him. She could see the boy, sitting alone in a bathtub of cold water, shivering in the dark, wondering how to make sense of his horrible world that he’d been brainwashed to think was good.

She fought back tears. Kevin, dear Kevin, I’m so sorry!She reached out her hand and put it on his arm. Who could do such terrible things to a little boy? There was more, details, stories that could undoubtedly fill a book to be studied by universities across the country. But she didn’t want to hear more. If she could only make it all go away. She might be able to stop Slater, but Kevin would live with this past until the day he died.

A brief absurd image of her lying down beside him and holding him gently in her arms ran through her mind.

Kevin suddenly groaned and then chuckled. “She’s a twisted, demented lunatic.”

Jennifer cleared her throat. “Agreed.”

“But you know what?”

“What?”

“Telling you about it makes me feel . . . good. I’ve never told anyone.”

“Not even Samantha?”

“No.”

“Sometimes talking about abuse helps us deal with it. Our tendency is to hide it, and that’s understandable. I’m glad you’re telling me. None of it was your fault, Kevin. It’s not your sin.”

He pushed himself up. His eyes were clearer. “You’re right. That old goat did everything in her power to hold me back.”

“When did you first realize that Balinda’s world wasn’t the only one?”

“When I met Samantha. She came to my window one night and helped me sneak out. But I was trapped, you know. I mean mentally. For a long time I couldn’t accept that Balinda was anything but a loving princess. When Samantha left to study law, she begged me to go with her. Or at least somewhere away from Balinda, but I couldn’t leave. I was twenty-three before I finally worked up the courage to leave. Balinda went ballistic.”

“And you’ve done all this in five years?”

He nodded and grinned softly. “Turns out that I was fairly intelligent. It only took me a year to get my general education papers, and four years to graduate from college.”

It occurred to Jennifer that she was treating him like a patient with these short, probing questions, but he seemed to want it now.

“Which is when you decided to become a minister,” she said.

“That’s a long story. I suppose because of my strange rearing the subject of good and evil held unusual fascination for me. Naturally I gravitated toward the church. Morality became somewhat of an obsession, I guess. I figured the least I could do was spend my life showing some small corner of the real world the way to true goodness.”