“Historically”—I swallowed, I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth; I swallowed again—“has this gone well?”

She opened her mouth, but I did not want her to speak yet, so I put my finger over her lips. The softness of her skin there made me panic-sick. I could not bear for Agnes’s body to enter the body of knowledge, to be offered for public consumption. I could not stand for anyone but us to take the sacrament of her. “You’re wrong, you’re strange, and what do you think—what do you think”—I flexed my hands over her shoulders—“someone who isn’t me is going to say?”

With the glossy look of a shot bird, she stepped away from me. I reached after her but stopped before I could touch her, unwelcome. “I love you so much, Agnes, I know how to. But what about the people who won’t?”

Agnes shook her head. Her face was stone and set. “You can be so dreadful, Geb. So dreadful and so selfish.”

I wanted to speak. Maybe there were worse things she could call me, but I could not think of any. Had I been selfish with her? And how, and when?

“Your problem”—she spoke so definitively that I could only imagine she must know—“is that you really want to be the only person who loves me, don’t you? You would rather I be alone, and unhappy, as long as I’m with you.”

I put my hands over my ears. “That’s not true.”

“You want there to be something about me that only you could love.”

“There are things about you. Like that.” I did not take my hands away, or look her in the eye. Perhaps I couldn’t. That she used to like to make me jealous, because she knew that I would let her, and maybe this was still true. That when I brought her the wounded rabbit, she held it wrapped tightly in the towel and close against her chest, even after she had cared for it all she could, even as it struggled, and, dying, stretched its wild head away from her. That she had wept, afterward, but closed her eyes, savoring, when she tasted the stew I made her. That if I learned how to really say no to her, I do not know if she would love me so much. “But not the mushrooms.”

Agnes took a step back from me, one that was measured. I inhaled, wanting badly to explain myself, to tell her that these things were true but it was true also that I loved them completely, that I loved her as I loved her mushrooms, benign and poisonous alike, with hunger aching sweetly in my jaw. But Agnes shook her head, and took a second step away.