“I was just asking your friend”—Arthur turned to Agnes—“if you have any stronger painkillers.” I watched the corners of his lips tug like he was trying to make his smile go wider than it should. I am always wary of that kind of person, who can tell within a few sentences who in the room will give them things.

Agnes touched the dip in her chin with one finger. “I think we do.” She turned to me. “Don’t we, Geb? From my wisdom teeth?”

“Maybe.”

She smiled at me.

I tipped my head toward our bedroom. “Probably in the medicine cabinet.” I wanted to speak to her alone, but she wasn’t moving.

“Would you go get it, Geb?”

I went and got it.

When I returned, squeezing the little orange bottle in my hand, Agnes had pulled the wicker chair up across from the sofa, and they were talking about getting Arthur back to town. “Y’all don’t have a car?” he said, in a tone that suggested he’d already said it once.

Agnes shook her head, apologetically. “We bike.”

“How far could you walk, do you think?” I asked. Arthur just grimaced and gestured to his foot, stretched out again on the top of the sofa. “How far did you walk to get here?”

“I—”

Agnes lifted the pill bottle, showing me where the label had rubbed off. “Do you remember what these are?”

“They’re for pain.”

“Yes.” Agnes held a pill up to her eyes, and turned it between her nails, squinting. “But what are they?” She paused. “Maybe Vicodin?”

“It’s fine.” Arthur held his hand out.

Agnes sucked on her lip, considering.

“It’s fine.”

She handed him the pill, which lay small and circular in his hand for a minute, before he swallowed it. “Give me two,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“It’s for pain,” he said, but Agnes capped the bottle and handed it back to me. I closed my hands around it. Arthur’s face contracted briefly, canine in his anger, upper lip curling toward a snarl, before he dropped his head onto the sofa’s armrest and exhaled a whistling breath through his teeth.

“Cars can’t come up here,” Agnes explained, gracious enough to ignore his ingratitude if she had noticed it at all, and lapsing, as she often did, back into another conversation. She had pulled the wicker chair perhaps two feet from the couch, within reaching distance, so I leaned against the top of it while she spoke, and idly extended one leg into the space between the two of them. It relaxed me, somewhat, to act as a border. “There used to be a road, but nobody can drive it now. Definitely an ambulance couldn’t.”

“Well—” Arthur began, and I interrupted him.

“Search-and-rescue will have something. An all-terrain vehicle. Or they could helivac him.”

Arthur hissed.

“What?” Agnes’s hand lifted. “Your foot?”