Yes, instead of a proper goose coop, I’d acquired a children’s playhouse. Not the most sensible idea for a notorious accused child rapist living in hiding with no children at home. I’d found the playhouse online, free to whomever was willing to come and pick it up from the nearby town of Holloways Beach. I’d scrolled past it at first. It was a dangerous idea. Vigilantes and gawkers had learned of my presence not long after I arrived in town, and they still drove by my house every now and then, curious about the man who’d somehow escaped justice. And one in three times when I opened the front door to a knock, it was a journalist who greeted me, notebook and pen thrust out like guns. All it would take was for one of these people to spy the playhouse in the backyard to bring the press and the public mob to my front door, pitchforks in hand, once more.

But money hadn’t exactly been in abundance, and the playhouse was free. A genuine goose coop cost anything from $1,200 upward, and all I really needed to do to the playhouse was remove the floor and replace it with wire, and build a ramp to the entrance for Woman and her young. Since I’d found them, the family of geese had settled on the porch of my small, barren house, and I liked to sleep out there on the couch sometimes when the night was hot and loud with the barking of crocodiles and the cry of night birds. More than once I’d been awakened at dawn by the sensation of a goose beak foraging for bugs in my hair. Sometimes the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes in the morning was a curious bird-face inches from mine, waiting for me to hand out the breakfast pellets. Something had to give.

I squatted in the grass and swept away some of the cobwebs from under the playhouse, tested the base with my fingers. I would cut it out with a jigsaw, staple a sheet of wire across the bottom, then fit a steel tray I could unhinge and spray out to keep the house clean. The construction of the cubby was solid and would protect the birds from the foxes and snakes that sometimes made guest appearances around the property, preying on waterhens down by the shore. I went to the front of the playhouse and opened the shuttered windows, tore down the moldy curtains that some kid had probably spent many years enjoying drawing against the outside world, closing their little house off in privacy for their games. Playing house. My daughter might have enjoyed a playhouse like this. She was going to be two years old in a week. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her in person, held her, warm and wriggling, against my chest.