THE NEXT DAY, JOSIE SAT ROCKING MADDY INTO HER DAILY NAP. It was gray and drizzly outside, and Tyler was sick with a cold. She had wrapped him in blankets and set him in front of the television, and now she listened to the drops of rain hit the roof and thought about the night before. Back at the house, Devesh had taken her over his knee and spanked her like a little kid. This was not something new, but it was what came before the spanking that was different. She had lain over his lap and listened to him lecture her for what seemed hours. Did she feel she needed to be disciplined, had she been good all day, had she made herself come without telling him.

She had gone hazy before he even touched her. It was the anticipation, the long relentless minutes when she knew what was coming and couldn’t stop it. Usually it took much more to get her to the place where she felt as if she were swimming in spiderwebs, her mind far gone from her body, but last night it had happened almost instantly. And then he began, slow, even smacks, and she counted them as if they were Christmas gifts. She felt her blood speeding through her veins, felt her body start to pulse, and then it began to rain. She could hear the drops slapping out of cadence with his hand, and abruptly her mind was driven forcefully back into her body. It was the rain. It made her think of Matthew, one quick thought, but enough to propel her back to herself, enough to have to work to not ask him to stop.

At Matthew’s funeral, it had rained—a storm that came from nowhere in the middle of the summer. At the reception afterward, she wandered the house, staring at people’s darkly clothed knees and listening to adult after adult say something about the peculiarity of the rain, but to her it had seemed completely appropriate. Her brother was dead. God was crying. Her nanny Alba had told her this, and although her mother had scoffed when she repeated it, Josie knew it was true. She had seen her mother cry, her father cry, but there had been no tears with the force of the ones outside. She figured God must be even sadder than her parents, sad enough to create enough tears to drown in. If God cried into a bathtub, she thought, it would fill up and she could cover herself in all that sadness.