"Okay," Lipton said, exhaling slowly, the anger still hot and tight in his chest. His first reaction, had he been less rational and more prone to acting without thought, would have been to grab Neal by the collar and shake the answers out of him, a fist near his face. It'd been a long time since he'd gotten into a fist fight - and had spent most of his adult life breaking them up, to be honest - but if anything could bring that out of him now it was anything endangering Jane, Lydia, and Richard.

But Neal - according to Neal's word, which Lipton didn't know how much to honour, now, but he had come forward with this on his own, and seemed sincere - Neal had said that he wasn't violent, and nobody after him would hurt his family. "Thanks for being honest about it now." It came out stilted, still, because that was better than letting his simmering anger show. They'd trusted him in their home, near their children, and he was a theif and a liar.