“He could tell someone,” I answered plainly, because I knew already that if we let him leave he would. Knew from how amiably he had let the idea lie when she rejected it. Knew because she had told him her drawings were not to be looked at, and the next morning he had found her sketchbook. Where had she kept that sketchbook? Even as we spoke, I thought of Agnes’s office door, which did not lock because until his arrival we had not needed locks within our little cottage, and the gallery, the buffet of her body’s fine phenomena tucked just behind it.

“Who’s he going to tell?”

I shook my head in one quick jerk. “Someone in town. A friend. Someone he meets on his trip home. A newspaper.” The magazines that Agnes wrote for turning hungry on her, a photograph of her skin, pitted with life. Worst of all, that it would not be her who wrote the words beneath it. “Anyone, someone.”

“All right, all right,” Agnes said, in that voice she used to soothe wild animals, the deer and the rabbits and me, born low in her chest and rasped against the roof of her mouth. She reached for me, slowly. “All right. What are you afraid of?”

I pulled away. My tongue was a snake in my mouth, snapping against the walls of it. “I’m afraid that someone will hurt you.”

“Who?”

How to explain to her that terror that was nonspecific but certain? Did you know that, once, witches were identified by a devil’s mark secreted somewhere on their bodies, which would not bleed when pricked? But the mark was not always visible, and for the task of uncovering it witch-finders carried special needles. Once, Agnes and I went to a diner together, and as we sat down the woman in the next booth said something quietly to her son, and then they both got up and went to sit on the other side of the restaurant. And when I mentioned this to Agnes, she shook her head as if to clear away a bad dream. No, she said, and, Really? and, I’m sure there’s another reason. But when she closed her mouth I thought I could hear the small creak of her teeth pressed too hard together. I could not imagine making a present of Agnes to the world, I could not imagine handing her to it gift-wrapped.

I could not imagine that Agnes had ever really lived out there, even if I had met her in the world and plucked her from it. Surely she grew in these woods. Surely we had always lived in this little house together, and that was why she was not afraid. I reached for her and she let me, so I unbuttoned her top. I showed her her chest, and all the secret bumps on it. I pressed my thumb on the raised head of something under her skin.