I closed my eyes. I pressed the mushroom to my tongue. I tried to think of the place on her body it had grown, and then could not bear to, with Arthur next to me, also thinking of her skin. And the damp pop of the mushroom in his mouth.

“My God,” he said. “My compliments to the chef.”

We ate mostly in silence, all three of us swallowed in the moment, in the different weights that hung from its different arms. Closing my lips around the last mushroom, I met Agnes’s eyes. The gray of them had darkened in the evening as if under rainwater. Her mouth was slightly open. What do you want? I would have said, if Arthur wasn’t there. Tell me anything you want. It doesn’t matter what. Tell me what you want, regardless, and I will give it to you.

Beside me, Arthur started to cry.

He did it soundlessly, with a quiet catching breath. So startling, that for a moment I imagined he was sorry.

He swallowed, and his throat bobbed, muscles sliding under skin. There was a thick sweat shining on his forehead, I noticed, and beginning to trickle down his face, a drip suspended from the tip of his nose and then falling. His hand lifted, trembling, to his throat.

I backed my chair away from the table. “I didn’t.” Shaking my head already. “I didn’t.” I would go for the phone. I would call whoever needed to be called, the helivac that should have come in the first place. There are no things that cannot be forgiven.

“What?” Arthur’s voice a low rasp over gravel. “What?”

Agnes caught my wrists in her hands. Holding my arms like we were children, the two of us swaying against the shift of the world. “I did.” Her blown pupils, her strange dark eyes. “It’s okay. I did.”

“What—” Arthur tried again, and his breath was a narrow little wheeze.

“Panicking . . .” I said, “panicking doesn’t help.”

I could see him trying to make himself level, trying to make his voice stable and flat, and his body, in its panic, looking for somewhere to go. He tried to rise, too suddenly, and gasped. His poor foot.

“What did I eat?” he demanded. “What did you feed me?”

Agnes’s palms were slick. When I released her hands, just for a moment, she flinched in the absence of me, a tremble that started in one single vibration, like a quake splitting the earth, and then didn’t stop. The glisten of sweat on her cheeks was like silver. I freed one of my hands from her grip, and touched my own tongue. “Not me, right?”

“No.” And she fell against my chest. She buried her breath in my shoulder, fixed her arms tight around me. In the background, there were Arthur’s gravelly little sobs. “No, not you.”

* * *

It was a gruesome thing.