She sat on the floor of her room with her back against the bed and the lock pushed in and the cat pouch open in her lap, and she laid the bills out on the carpet in rows, ones with ones, fives with fives, the two twenties at the end. One hundred and eighty-six. She counted again. One hundred and eighty-six. The third time she did it slowly, touching each bill, and it was still one hundred and eighty-six, and she didn't know why that made her start crying again, but it did, silently, with her mouth shut tight so nobody would hear through the wall.
It was all there. Nothing was missing. She had gotten every dollar back.
It didn't feel like getting anything back.
There was a white smudge on the corner of one of the fives. Dust from the vase. She looked at it for a long time. Then she licked her thumb and rubbed it, and it came off, mostly, and she felt like she had done something wrong, though she couldn't have said what.
Her father knocked. She knew it was him because her mother didn't knock; her mother said things through doors, and Micah just turned the handle and kicked when it wouldn't open.
"Simone. It's Dad."
She didn't answer. She gathered up the bills and squared them and put them back in the pouch.
"You don't have to open it," he said. "I just—can I say something through the door?"
She didn't say no. After a while he must have taken that as yes, because she heard him lean against the frame, heard the creak of the old wood, heard him sit down on the hall carpet the way he did sometimes outside Micah's room when Micah had nightmares.
"I should have said something before today," he said.
Simone stopped with the zipper halfway closed.
"The camera," her father said. "I've had it on my phone this whole time. I don't watch it much. But I've seen things. Not everything. Some things." A pause. "The rug. In August. I saw him take the juice upstairs."
Simone sat very still.
She had known. Or not known, exactly—she had never put it into words—but there had been a feeling, for a long time, that her father saw more than he said. The way he would bring her a soda from the gas station after a bad day without being asked. The way he looked at her sometimes across the dinner table when her mother was talking, as if he wanted to say something and was holding it in his mouth like a hot bite. She had thought, sometimes, that it meant he was on her side. Secretly. In a way that would show up someday when it counted.
Now she understood that it had meant he knew, and that knowing was all he had been going to do.