Josie counted the lines on her palms, and they sat there in painful silence until Tyler knocked on the door asking for raisins. After that, Mary didn’t ask again, but the question hung over the house like a wrecking ball.

*   *   *

Three weeks into the affair, Josie and Tyler were sitting in the driveway drawing on the pavement with sidewalk chalk when Mary came home from the lab early. Tyler had drawn concentric blue circles around himself and was now retracing them yellow.

“What’s that?” Mary asked him.

“Circles,” Tyler said. “They’re just circles.”

Josie dusted her palms on her jeans and stood. “Maddy’s asleep on a blanket under the tree.”

Mary nodded and looked down at the drawing. “Looks like a giant breast,” she said.

Josie laughed and then covered her mouth.

“Doesn’t it?” she asked Josie.

“Yeah.” Josie smiled. She looked at Mary and her chest tightened.

Last night, Josie had stood in the hallway, rocking Maddy, who had a slight fever, and watching Mary play some game with Tyler. Everything was opposite: night was day, Tyler was Maddy, dinner was breakfast. “Time to get up,” Mary had said. “Time for school clothes,” Tyler responded. Pajamas went on backward and Tyler, who normally fought whenever clothes came on or off, stripped down quickly and shoved his arms in his backward top. “Time to make your bed,” Mary chirped and Tyler jumped under the covers and pulled out his animal encyclopedia. Mary smiled brightly and kissed Tyler on the head. “I love you, Boo Boo Bear.” Josie had breathed in sharply. It was what her mother had called her. And her younger brother, Matthew, had been Baby Bear. Often, her mother would put the two of them to sleep together in Josie’s wide canopy bed, and Josie would curl like a shell around Matthew while he sucked his bottle and stared transfixed into her eyes. “Say it,” Josie would whisper, and her mother would—a simple statement, over and over, but enough to put them both to sleep, two bears in their bed—“He is your only brother; you are his only sister.”

She looked at Tyler drawing circles, then at Mary. “You’re home early.”

“What a day.” Mary sighed. “The power went out at the university, and when the generator didn’t go on, there were a dozen crazy academics running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Of course it went on five minutes later.” She dropped her briefcase and leaned against the garage door. “Then I locked myself out of my office, had to go all the way to maintenance to get the key, and of course on the way I ran into that stupid surgeon.”

The ground shifted beneath Josie’s feet. She looked down and concentrated on Tyler’s smooth yellow circles.

“But I got butterscotch ice cream,” Mary said and held up the bag.

It was Josie’s favorite, and she suddenly felt sick with guilt.