I wanted to speak. Maybe there were worse things she could call me, but I could not think of any. Had I been selfish with her? And how, and when?

“Your problem”—she spoke so definitively that I could only imagine she must know—“is that you really want to be the only person who loves me, don’t you? You would rather I be alone, and unhappy, as long as I’m with you.”

I put my hands over my ears. “That’s not true.”

“You want there to be something about me that only you could love.”

“There are things about you. Like that.” I did not take my hands away, or look her in the eye. Perhaps I couldn’t. That she used to like to make me jealous, because she knew that I would let her, and maybe this was still true. That when I brought her the wounded rabbit, she held it wrapped tightly in the towel and close against her chest, even after she had cared for it all she could, even as it struggled, and, dying, stretched its wild head away from her. That she had wept, afterward, but closed her eyes, savoring, when she tasted the stew I made her. That if I learned how to really say no to her, I do not know if she would love me so much. “But not the mushrooms.”

Agnes took a step back from me, one that was measured. I inhaled, wanting badly to explain myself, to tell her that these things were true but it was true also that I loved them completely, that I loved her as I loved her mushrooms, benign and poisonous alike, with hunger aching sweetly in my jaw. But Agnes shook her head, and took a second step away.

“I’m going to make dinner tonight,” she said, “and until he leaves. I don’t want you preparing any food,” and she shook her head at me, slowly, the way that one looks at a dying animal. I found a deer corpse one day, while hiking through the woods, that was dissolving under the worms, the fungi, the beaks of the crows. The pale antlers lying against the earth. One of its eyes was still partially intact, with the socket just beginning to pull away, and a sheen of once-white liquid. Do you imagine expressions on the faces of corpses? It looked desperate. “Not his,” Agnes said, “and not mine.”

* * *

I slept in the backyard that night, and not much at all. I looked at the clusters of the stars, watched a spider stringing up webbing in our rosebush. Perhaps it was not necessary for me to go back at all. The cottage might close itself, become the perfect yellow shape of an egg containing only Agnes and Arthur, and his large hand with its chapped knuckles smoothing over the seashell curve of her body. How well they could fit into each other, those archetypes of masculine hardness and feminine softness, and how little place there was for me between them.