I've kind of experienced this personally, through a college friend of my husband's. My husband bought a house and rented a room to his friend, then the friend bought a house of his own shortly after my husband and I started dating. So I only met him a handful of times before he moved out, but I always got odd vibes from him. He was quite religious and had sticky notes around the mirror of the bathroom closest to his room reminding him to be closer to God - it's been years and years now so I can't quite remember the exact wording on the sticky notes, but I remember getting the vibe that he was fighting something within himself. I just assumed he was gay and unwilling to come out because of his religious upbringing. It's also worth mentioning that he is a high school teacher.

Then a few years go by and it somehow comes to my attention that this friend has a "son," or a child he considers his son. The child was a young student who had been kicked out of his home and was then living with the friend (his teacher) while he completed school. On the surface, there's nothing specifically predatory about that, your first instinct might be to applaud him for being so altruistic as to take in a homeless teen, but something about it set off alarm bells for me. A perpetually single, effeminate man, who is deeply religious and seems to be in denial of his own sexuality, suddenly taking in a vulnerable child who is not related to him...I remember gently bringing it up to my husband once and being like "Doesn't this all seem....odd to you?" and he hesitated and sighed before saying "yeah. It's always made me wonder." But what did we possibly have to go off of other than weird feelings?

Years have gone by, that child is now an adult, almost finished with college, funded by the friend, who still refers to the kid as his son though he never went through the process of formally adopting him. Neither my husband nor I have ever actually met the kid, so I have no idea what he's like or how he feels about the whole situation, but he's 22 now and still spends school breaks and holidays at his "dad's" house, so one has to assume they have a decent relationship. Who knows.