“Sometimes … lately,” she stumbled, “I’ve been wanting to do bad stuff.” She knew that if she didn’t say it now, her courage would evaporate on the ride home. “To Tyler. I mean, sometimes I want to hit him.”

He looked at her over the roof of the car. “Get in.”

She slid into the front seat and looked at her hands, and the same enormous feeling washed over her. “I want to hurt him. I want to … I don’t know … but it’s bad. It’s very bad.”

He looked at her. “Have you?”

“No.”

“When he misbehaves, you mean.”

She nodded.

He put his hand on her knee. “I think that’s normal. I mean, I don’t know, but it seems like a normal impulse.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not normal.”

“But you haven’t.”

She shook her head.

“Children can drive you crazy,” he said. “As long as you didn’t do it, and you didn’t—”

“I want to hurt him,” she interrupted.

“But you didn’t.”

“I want to slap him … I … I want to spank him.” She looked at Devesh and held his gaze. There was a long silence, and she knew she had admitted something she could not take back.

“You think it’s because of the games we play.”

She could hear the defensiveness in his voice. She shrugged.

“Fine; then we won’t play them anymore.” He started the car.

“No.”

“Then what, Josie?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you can’t leave it in the bedroom, we’ll stop. We’ll just stop.”

She was afraid he would take it away from her, that he would see what was growing inside her and think he could stunt it.

“No,” she said. “No. I can. I can. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s just the stress—Mary and the kids. And I didn’t do it, you’re right, I didn’t actually do it.” She didn’t believe what she was saying, but she didn’t care. The thought of him taking away what she had thought she could never have was enough to pull the lie from her chest. And maybe it wasn’t a lie after all. Tyler had blamed his tears on Maddy. Maybe he knew for sure what Josie didn’t, that she would never really do it.

Devesh looked at her for a long time and then pulled her close. “What happens between us, that’s just …”

“I know.” She didn’t want to hear anymore, just wanted to believe that Tyler knew more than she did, that at least for Devesh this dark thing wasn’t always there like an inner stain, that the games they created were just games, made up out of nothing, just to play with.

CHAPTER EIGHT