He pulled down the attic ladder and craned to listen for the garage door. The sound of nothing spurred him on to full speed. The quiet wouldn’t last.

Up the ladder in three pulls, he moved a box from in front, and one from on top of a locked trunk, and took the key from the gap between a pair of raw two-by-fours.

Hiding the satchel and the painting was tricky, but the money wouldn’t be worth less after aging in the heat and the cold of the attic, or after a plumbing mishap in the basement. Money, dry or damp, would still spend.

At first he’d put the painting, wrapped against humidity, down in the skeletal unfinished basement, behind the open, raw-wood stairs with the boxes and cobwebs and mousetraps where no one ever wanted to go. Then he decided he didn’t trust it.

If anything good was about the Flinck’s being on the wall in the foyer, it was the air-conditioning in the summer and the soft gas heat in the winter. Even the sunlight didn’t get to it where it had landed.

He drew a short stack of bills from the dwindling green bricks. It had been four years of pocket money and expensive indulgences, but not the life he wanted, not the life that was so tantalizingly close.

He’d found a way to bide time before selling the Flinck, to buffer his trickery and accessory-after-the-fact vulnerability with a thick sheaf of calendar pages. It meant being a different person again, and that was kind of fun.

Donna was gorgeous, the sex was great, and a courtship and a wedding kept the schedule full of something other than waiting. She and Carly both had been so much better than what he’d needed to pass the days.

In his attic, their attic, above the rooms where he’d been part of a happy, laughing routine he dropped his hands to his sides, struck suddenly heavy and unsure by how fast the time with them had flown. It wouldn’t have if they’d been less than they were.

An ache swelled into his throat, but he shook his head against it. It didn’t matter. Anyway, he didn’t have to decide right now what this meant for them as a situation. He wouldn’t call it a family. Family felt too inevitable, something you didn’t choose. He chose this. He could choose to cut it loose. Or he could choose to find something in between.

John resecured the trunk and its camouflage, stowed the key, and eased the attic access door closed. He listened for the garage door. Still nothing. He swiped the grit and insulation dust from the floor with a static mop and smiled at the small success. Anything that went well in these last few days felt like getting away with skipping school.