“You can’t.” My voice sounded sharp and lonely, a crow shrieking its rage outside. “You can’t have that.”

“Why not?”

When Agnes came into the room, I can imagine what she saw on my face. What I saw on hers was nothing, the flat capstone sliding into place in a wall. When ancient builders built houses, did you know they would bury a man alive beneath them? To ensure the stability of the house.

“You can’t have that,” I said again, thinking that she had said she loved me, that anger did not kill love, or that, if it did, it killed it like amatoxin. Over a long period, with several lapses and relapses. This is just for us, Agnes had said, had agreed, had upheld. This is just for us.

“Geb.” The flat line of Agnes’s mouth fell on me like a floorboard. “Geb, stop it.”

And Arthur took another bite.

* * *

Even inside loss, or the curled serpent of its potential, things have to fill the day.

I cleaned, I made no food. I paced circles in the garden. I took my bike to the road and did not ride it anywhere.

There was one beautiful place. Our small stone house, and the two of us inside it.

Inside, Agnes sat next to Arthur on our couch. She smiled at him, and maintained that careful foot of distance.

She showed him a sketch she had done of him, and he turned it around and showed it to me, resting on his laurels. She had drawn him, the fine knots of each of his muscles, the open collar of his plaid shirt, his golden retriever hair flattened against the sides of his face. He had started to smell, from several days on our couch, and his hair was greasy slick, but she had managed not to draw that. She had drawn him with a loveliness.

For lunch, Agnes served all of us leftovers. Arthur stood from the couch and loped over to the table. “I think,” he said, leaning at me over his plate, “that you’re quite a loving person, Geb, deep down, but I wish you would work on some of this toxicity.”

Agnes caught my wrist. “No,” she said, “no.”

“See?” Arthur said. He pushed two greasy strands of hair out of his face, and then he laid his hand heavy on my shoulder. There was the slick of his sweat. Frogs breathe through their skin. Imagine, being cupped in someone’s hands, and suffocated. “This is what I mean.”

And then Agnes put her hand on his wrist. “You shouldn’t touch people,” she said, “without their permission.”