She showed him a sketch she had done of him, and he turned it around and showed it to me, resting on his laurels. She had drawn him, the fine knots of each of his muscles, the open collar of his plaid shirt, his golden retriever hair flattened against the sides of his face. He had started to smell, from several days on our couch, and his hair was greasy slick, but she had managed not to draw that. She had drawn him with a loveliness.

For lunch, Agnes served all of us leftovers. Arthur stood from the couch and loped over to the table. “I think,” he said, leaning at me over his plate, “that you’re quite a loving person, Geb, deep down, but I wish you would work on some of this toxicity.”

Agnes caught my wrist. “No,” she said, “no.”

“See?” Arthur said. He pushed two greasy strands of hair out of his face, and then he laid his hand heavy on my shoulder. There was the slick of his sweat. Frogs breathe through their skin. Imagine, being cupped in someone’s hands, and suffocated. “This is what I mean.”

And then Agnes put her hand on his wrist. “You shouldn’t touch people,” she said, “without their permission.”

I had fancied myself, before, Agnes’s tame animal. Until the sun went down, I measured the here and there of our yard like a dying dog. I thought of places that I could bury a body if I wanted to bury a body. The woods are full of places like that. The woods know what to do with a body. When Agnes came to the door to call me, I did not raise my head.

“Will you come in for dinner?”

“No.”

Agnes sighed, pushed a phantom strand of hair from her face. “Can you not,” she murmured, “act like the world is ending? For once, can’t something be the right size for you? He’s leaving soon, and I’ll still be here. Will you come in and eat dinner? I cooked.”

Her hands were small knots in her skirt. She looked teenage, and the evening was opening its arms for her. She looked like she might touch the back of my neck, and soothe the thorns of my hair there. I went inside.

She’d made that simple dinner again, mushrooms over rice. With zucchini and carrots, and the hint of balsamic. The way that I liked it. This might be called a peace offering, except that she served it to us both.

I want you to know that before this, there was a moment when the meal simmered, when the plates were laid out, when Arthur was looking at Agnes’s sketchbook, and Agnes was away in the bedroom, when I could have dropped something into the pot. Perhaps I could not have gone fast enough to the garden, and dug up a death cap or an ivory funnel, and slipped it secretly into the meal. But perhaps I could have. I want you to know that there was a chance, and that I didn’t take it.