Wally shook his head. “You’ve bought into the hysteria.”

A chill settled over Shad. “Are you about to tell me that adults and children should have equal access to each other? Are you gonna give me the spin that children should be given the right to express their affection physically?”

“No, no, of course not. But there is a hysteria out there. These days a teacher can’t even put an arm around a student as comfort without getting fired. People condemn everything in one broad sweep rather than looking at individual situations. What happened to you was one situation –”

“Three years.”

“You were the only one.” Wally leveled his gaze with Shad’s. “I was wrong to bring you into my confusion, I suppose, but I never meant you harm. I never did you any harm. So you got some experience maybe a little younger than some other kids. People will experiment, play around. I did nothing worse to you than kids often do with each other anyway.”

“Oh, you did more.” Shad’s eyes narrowed. “Those were no innocent games of playing doctor. You also robbed me of freedom of choice. It wasn’t my choice as a child to engage in the kind of activity that as an adult I would choose to save for my wife. You used me for your own pleasure, plain and simple.”

Wally shook his head. “It didn’t bother you then. It only bothers you now because others have convinced you that you’re supposed to feel ashamed by what happened. Probably have some religious guilt built in there, too. Remember, I was barely more than a kid myself.”

“What was your motivation to change? What steps did you take to bring about that change?”

Wally stared at him for a few seconds before replying. “I don’t go looking for boys. I know who I am now. What happened with us is in the past and has nothing to do with the present.”

“You didn’t answer the questions.”

“Here’s a question.” Wally leaned forward again. “Are you still beating your wife?” In the couple of seconds that Wally waited for his words to soak in, Shad felt a sickening sensation almost like nausea sweep through him. “You see, not all questions have a simple answer. I went through a process, a journey. I can’t recount it off the top of my head because I didn’t have a problem I was dealing with methodically.”

Lies. Bald-faced lies. Shad knew too much about the challenges of pedophilia to accept any of Wally’s claims. He also had studied too much about molestation to doubt his conclusion about Wally.

“If I was so special and the only one, how is it you were able to abandon me so easily?” Shad still tried to pry out a sliver of truth. “You never came back to check up on me or try to reconnect in any way.”

“You got to remember I was still pretty young at the time. I didn’t know what I was doing. And after what we’d done, well, I kind of figured it would be best if we stayed away from each other.”

“You knew what that woman was like. I was practically gift-wrapped for you. Did you really think you could leave me with her and I’d be fine?” An irritation Shad hadn’t experienced in a long time began squirming to the surface of tangled emotions.

“I guess I just figured ... she’d find somebody else to take care of you.”

“Take care of me?” Shad’s voice rumbled lower than he’d expected. “The parade of men that passed through her bed convinced me we didn’t need to keep our relationship such a secret. She did nothing to stop them when I was punched and kicked and burned and strangled.” Shad caught himself. Something too much like rage threatened to break to the surface, and he drew a deep breath to quash the writhing emotions back into the depths of his soul.

Wally stared at him for a few seconds before responding. “Then why are you on my doorstep instead of theirs?”

“Abuse is abuse but the nature of yours is especially pernicious.” Shad was relieved to hear that his voice wasn’t so low anymore. “Yours is one case where I might be able to save the future for others.”

“From what?” Wally sat up. “You rate the care I gave you as worse than the beatings those cretins dished out? You really have been swept up in a witch hunt if you think I’m more dangerous than they are.”

“The ramifications of abuse are all the same, no matter what form it takes.”

“That’s ridiculous. I didn’t abuse you.” Wally leaned forward. “Honestly, Shadow –”

The growl erupted from Shad without warning. “Don’t call me that.”

Wally’s eyes widened for a second before he nodded. “All right. But just think about it. Everything I did with you was an act of love. Everything those bastards did to you was an act of violence.”

“Acting on a sexual impulse doesn’t equal love.”

“I was always careful. Made sure I didn’t hurt you.”

“How gentle you are doesn’t change the confusion, the helplessness, the betrayal felt by those boys.”

“Dammit!” Wally hissed, and the expletive sparked a flash of alarm in Shad as they always did. But then Wally drew a visible breath and leaned back in his chair. “How can I possibly prove a negative to you? There are no other boys. It was you and me. That’s all. If you think you need to come riding in here on some great white horse, you’re wrong.”

“The odds you changed are not in your favor.”

The two men stared at each other for a few seconds, and then Wally shifted in his seat and briefly glanced down before returning his attention to Shad.

“Can’t you at least agree that people can change?”

Of course people could change. Shad himself was living proof that a person’s life course could change a whole one hundred eighty degrees. But Wally had given him nothing to suggest the man had made such changes. Instead, Wally refused to take responsibility for his actions. And his arguments in defense of this “phase” Wally insisted he was done with rang too much like the activist arguments Shad had become familiar with.

And pedophilia didn’t just go away. Wally’s claims of experimentation might even suggest that his condition coexisted with other paraphilias like fetishism or voyeurism, which was commonly the case. All psychotherapeutic studies confirmed it was a markedly pervasive disorder that persistently defied eradication. Wally was still a liar.

“People can change,” Shad replied. “But you aren’t one of them.”

“Why won’t you believe me?”

Shad frowned. “I didn’t become a lawyer on a whim. In a way, I have you to thank for my choice of profession. And if I want to see to it that people like you get put away, I have to know what to look for.”

Wally stared at him for a few seconds before replying. “Don’t assume you know everything. You can’t judge me based on books you’ve read. If you bring up charges because you think I still do that stuff, you won’t be saving innocent lives. You’ll be tearing them apart. I admit we shouldn’t have done what we did, but otherwise you have to admit that I did take care of you. On the basis that I was always kind to you, can you at least show a little kindness to me now?”

“You abused me and then you abandoned me. The kindness was just to facilitate getting what you wanted.”

“I didn’t know any better. Your mom made me leave. How many times do I have to say that? I was young and I was stupid. After all, I didn’t come from such a great background myself, you know.”

Part of what Wally said echoed in Shad’s memory. Considering his own background, if Mam and Pap hadn’t brought him in and taught Shad to bend to divine will, his own will would have led him to a much darker place. And Shad could have believed that what he was doing wasn’t really harmful ... just like Wally. It was unsettling they could have that much in common, yet there remained one glaring difference between them even if Wally ever did overcome his disorder.

“Is this the part where you claim you were molested too?” Shad asked in a flat monotone, but he could feel the prickling of something unpleasant beneath the question.