Yet he hadn’t even been able to ascertain in which direction the guy had fled.

He threw his hands in the air and turned to look towards the top of the hill. Cindy was standing with her arms wrapped around Jake’s shoulders. The pair looked terribly fragile and small. The gray sky loomed over them like gunpowder. It was streaked with clouds just starting to hiss with rain. Frank stared at Cindy and then at Jake, realizing how vulnerable they seemed. He started the long walk back up the hill, his shoulders stiff with defeat. His family increased in size as he moved, as though he were zooming in on their distress. He trained his gaze on Jake and felt a chill run through him. His son was wiping tears from his eyes. Still clutching to his chest the black-booted Action Man. His gift from the man in the trees.

* * *

Frank walked back towards Cindy and Jake, his sense of humiliation hardening with every step. He looked down at his hands. They felt slick and useless, leathery with rain. His whole body felt weightless, as though the best part of him had escaped.

He approached Cindy and stared into her rain-sodden face. She looked shell-shocked.

“Why does he still have it?” he asked, his temper simmering.

Cindy looked confused.

“The fucking doll! The one that pervert gave him.”

Jake’s whimpering grew louder and he sensed the boy’s grip on the Action Man instinctively tighten.

“I tried,” Cindy said. “He wouldn’t let the damn thing go.” She held Jake even tighter, and Frank had a fleeting image of his family as Russian dolls, steadily decreasing in size: Cindy, Jake, and now the Action Man. He wondered, for a desperate moment, why he suddenly felt so excluded from the group.

“Jake,” he said, bending down to his son. “Are you okay?”

The boy nodded nervously, sinking into the fabric of his mother’s skirt.

“Did the man touch you?”

Jake shook his head.

“What did he say?”

“He gave me Joey,” Jake said, holding up the Action Man. “He told me he was my new best friend.”

“Can I see him?”

Jake shoved the doll behind his back. “He’s asleep right now, Daddy.”

Frank glanced at Cindy, feeling the weight of her gaze, the hardness of it.

“Alright,” Frank said, reluctantly playing along, desperate to tear the thing from his son’s hand and rip its fucking head off. “But when Joey wakes up, Daddy wants to see him. Is that okay?”

Jake looked up at Cindy, then back at Frank. He nodded slowly, but Frank knew already that Jake had no intention of handing the toy over to his father. Not that it would present too much of a problem. He suspected Joey would have an accident in the middle of the night. Something unspeakable. Something the black-booted bastard deserved.

“What else did the man say?” Frank said.

Jake smiled, remembering. “He made me laugh,” he said. “He made funny faces for me.”

Frank felt another wrench in his gut, a sense of violation that an unknown man had taken something that was uniquely his—the capacity to make Jake laugh—and had twisted it into something toxic and unwholesome.