Free Tell Me No Secrets by Joy Fielding Page A

confined to the courtroom.”
    Don’t bite, she thought. Don’t let him get to you. “I see,” she said, despite her best efforts. “It’s okay to be strong when I’m fighting someone else’s battles, just not my own.”
    “Who says you always have to be fighting?”
    “I don’t think Jess is tough,” Maureen offered, her voice questioning.
    “Tell me, Jess,” Barry asked, “why is it that as soon as a woman gets a little power, she loses her sense of humor?”
    “And why is it that whenever a man fails at being funny, he attacks a woman’s sense of humor?” Jess shot back.
    “There’s a big difference between being strong and being tough,” Barry said, returning to his original point, and emphasizing it with a nod of his head, as if this were one of those constitutional truths supposed to be self-evident. “A man can afford to be both; a woman can’t.”
    “Jess,” Maureen intervened softly, “you know Barry’s just teasing you.”
    Jess jumped to her feet. “Bullshit, he’s teasing!”
    Tyler’s head snapped toward his aunt.
    “Kindly watch your language in this house,” Barry admonished.
    Jess felt the sting of his rebuke sharper than a slap across the face. She desperately hoped she wouldn’t cry. “So now we don’t swear either, is that right?” she said, using her voice to keep the tears at bay. “We don’t drink Coke and we don’t swear.”
    Barry looked at his wife, his hands in the air, as if giving up.
    “Jess, please,” Maureen implored, tugging on her sister’s hand, trying to draw her back down on the couch.
    “I just want to make sure I have all your husband’s rules straight.” Jess glared at her brother-in-law, who wassuddenly a poster boy for reason and calm. He’d gotten to her again, she realized, disgusted and ashamed of herself. “I don’t know how you do it,” she muttered dejectedly. “It must take some special skill.”
    “What are you fulminating about now?” Barry asked, a look of genuine puzzlement in his eyes.
    “Fulminating?” Jess gasped, abandoning any further attempts at control. “Fulminating?”
    “Tyler,” Maureen began, rising and gently steering her son out of the room, “why don’t you take your new toy upstairs and play with it there?”
    “I want to stay here,” the boy protested.
    “Tyler, go play in your room until we call you for dinner,” his father instructed.
    The boy jumped into immediate action.
    “His master’s voice,” Jess said as the youngster scampered up the stairs.
    “Jess, please,” Maureen urged.
    “I didn’t start it.” Jess heard the hurt child in her voice, was angry and embarrassed that they could hear it too.
    “It doesn’t matter who started it,” Maureen was saying, speaking as if to two children, refusing to make eye contact with either of them. “What matters is that it stops before it goes any further.”
    “Consider it stopped.” Barry’s voice filled the large room.
    Jess said nothing.
    “Jess?”
    Jess nodded, her head swimming with anger and guilt. Guilt for her anger, anger for her guilt.
    “So, what’s next on the prosecutor’s agenda?” Maureen’s words were full of forced joviality, as if she were visiting aterminally ill patient in the hospital. Her normally soft voice was a shrill half octave higher than usual. She returned to the rose-colored sofa and patted the seat beside her with an intensity approaching desperation. Neither Jess nor Barry moved.
    “A few drug charges I’m hoping we can plead out,” Jess told her, “and I go to trial the week after next on another assault case. Oh, and I have a meeting on Monday with the lawyer who’s representing that man who shot his estranged wife with a crossbow.” Jess massaged the bridge of her nose, disturbed by the matter-of-factness in her tone.
    “With a crossbow, my God!” Maureen shuddered. “How barbaric.”
    “You must have read about it in the paper a few months back. It made all the front