“Do you think I’m going to cheat on you?” Agnes asked. There was an angle to the question, to position it as the farthest possible thing.

“He keeps touching you.”

She touched her forehead, the crease of skin between her eyes. “I don’t want him to touch me.”

I started to sit up, feeling a spreading heat, an elastic outrage. “Then—”

Agnes cut me off. “He’s just being nice.”

“He’s not.”

“You can’t keep me locked up here,” she said. She had lain back down again, settled herself on the pillows. She was staring up at the soft whiteness of the ceiling like I had built her a prison. “I miss people, Geb. You aren’t the only person.”

I’m sure it won’t surprise you that he did not leave after one day. He lounged on the couch. Agnes changed his bandages for him, her fingers like spider legs over his ankles. He talked to her around me, when I cleaned, while I cooked. “I wish I could help you,” he said to me, while I wiped down the coffee table where he had been resting his foot. Arthur told Agnes about his art, stories from his office, about his buddies, and their hiking trips. He made her laugh.

I knew he got up when neither of us were in the room. It was the small things. Two or three books rearranged on the shelf, his phone charger plugged in on the other side of the room, a bowl of oatmeal, or a glass of water, already at his side in the morning.

Agnes did pull away when he touched her. She did sit far on the other side of the couch from him. She angled her shoulders to avoid his hand on her back. He was casual, expansive. I took care never to pass by him closely enough that he could reach for me, because he would.

“Stop,” I said, when his hand grazed my hip. “Stop. I don’t want you to touch me.”

And he lifted his palm, held it up to me as if in surrender. “Sorry, sorry, Officer. It was an accident.”

I walked away, but he was still speaking to himself, to Agnes in the room with him, her head bowed over her laptop, writing up one of her articles, maybe listening and maybe not. “Didn’t know I was over the legal limit, Officer. Sorry about that.”

I made him rice, tomatoes, pasta. “I wish I could help you,” he said to me again, from his seat on the couch, with his foot atop it, lying in the stain of his own blood. “What are you two eating?” he would say, when Agnes and I had our dinner. “That looks good.”

* * *