“All right, all right,” Agnes said, in that voice she used to soothe wild animals, the deer and the rabbits and me, born low in her chest and rasped against the roof of her mouth. She reached for me, slowly. “All right. What are you afraid of?”

I pulled away. My tongue was a snake in my mouth, snapping against the walls of it. “I’m afraid that someone will hurt you.”

“Who?”

How to explain to her that terror that was nonspecific but certain? Did you know that, once, witches were identified by a devil’s mark secreted somewhere on their bodies, which would not bleed when pricked? But the mark was not always visible, and for the task of uncovering it witch-finders carried special needles. Once, Agnes and I went to a diner together, and as we sat down the woman in the next booth said something quietly to her son, and then they both got up and went to sit on the other side of the restaurant. And when I mentioned this to Agnes, she shook her head as if to clear away a bad dream. No, she said, and, Really? and, I’m sure there’s another reason. But when she closed her mouth I thought I could hear the small creak of her teeth pressed too hard together. I could not imagine making a present of Agnes to the world, I could not imagine handing her to it gift-wrapped.

I could not imagine that Agnes had ever really lived out there, even if I had met her in the world and plucked her from it. Surely she grew in these woods. Surely we had always lived in this little house together, and that was why she was not afraid. I reached for her and she let me, so I unbuttoned her top. I showed her her chest, and all the secret bumps on it. I pressed my thumb on the raised head of something under her skin.

“Historically”—I swallowed, I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth; I swallowed again—“has this gone well?”

She opened her mouth, but I did not want her to speak yet, so I put my finger over her lips. The softness of her skin there made me panic-sick. I could not bear for Agnes’s body to enter the body of knowledge, to be offered for public consumption. I could not stand for anyone but us to take the sacrament of her. “You’re wrong, you’re strange, and what do you think—what do you think”—I flexed my hands over her shoulders—“someone who isn’t me is going to say?”

With the glossy look of a shot bird, she stepped away from me. I reached after her but stopped before I could touch her, unwelcome. “I love you so much, Agnes, I know how to. But what about the people who won’t?”

Agnes shook her head. Her face was stone and set. “You can be so dreadful, Geb. So dreadful and so selfish.”