“Don’t be,” she said. I reached out to grab her shoulder, but she leaned away, this small, quick motion, which was not enough to be out of my reach, but enough to signify that she wanted to be. So I couldn’t touch her. So I could do nothing, because sound carried in our little house, and she slipped around the corner, and back out to him.

* * *

When Agnes came to bed that night, she lay facing away from me. “Don’t be angry,” I said, to the raised mountain of her back, the line of white mushrooms, the destroying angels of her back. “I love you, don’t be angry with me.”

She turned over to look at the ceiling, and then she guided me toward her. My cheek against her chest, against the ridge of her collarbone. “I’m not angry with you.” Her voice had a stillness to it that made me think of empty clearings, of fairy rings, of being spirited off to some far, awful place. Hush, I wanted her to say. Oh hush. “It isn’t healthy, though, how suspicious you are. It isn’t healthy how the only person you love is me.”

“That’s not true.”

She sighed, and touched my hair, pressed her nails into the back of my neck like I was a dog. “Who else do you love?”

“Why is it a problem that I’m loyal to you?”

My father is dead. I don’t talk to my school friends anymore, and had few to begin with. I never got along with people at work. It’s a miracle that I met Agnes, but I have, anyway, always been a one-woman creature.

Her breath shivered in her throat, a sound like that small, rustling beat of wings. “Is that what you think, that I’m not loyal to you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s fucked up,” she said, “that you think me caring about other people implies that.”

I lifted my head off her chest. I opened my mouth, thinking to say something.

“Not even caring about,” she said, “even being nice to.”

“I don’t like him.”

Agnes sat up then, sharply; her shoulder knocked into my chest. “I don’t care if you like him.”

“Do you like him?”

She shook her head, hard. She looked like a schoolteacher when she did that. I wasn’t sure whether this was an answer or not. “He’s hurt. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t care,” I said, because I didn’t. If he was going to die in the woods, then I thought he ought to die there. I thought it would be a generous use of his body to feed it to crows. There were people who asked to have their body fed to crows, when they died. They called body farms about it.