I had fancied myself, before, Agnes’s tame animal. Until the sun went down, I measured the here and there of our yard like a dying dog. I thought of places that I could bury a body if I wanted to bury a body. The woods are full of places like that. The woods know what to do with a body. When Agnes came to the door to call me, I did not raise my head.

“Will you come in for dinner?”

“No.”

Agnes sighed, pushed a phantom strand of hair from her face. “Can you not,” she murmured, “act like the world is ending? For once, can’t something be the right size for you? He’s leaving soon, and I’ll still be here. Will you come in and eat dinner? I cooked.”

Her hands were small knots in her skirt. She looked teenage, and the evening was opening its arms for her. She looked like she might touch the back of my neck, and soothe the thorns of my hair there. I went inside.

She’d made that simple dinner again, mushrooms over rice. With zucchini and carrots, and the hint of balsamic. The way that I liked it. This might be called a peace offering, except that she served it to us both.

I want you to know that before this, there was a moment when the meal simmered, when the plates were laid out, when Arthur was looking at Agnes’s sketchbook, and Agnes was away in the bedroom, when I could have dropped something into the pot. Perhaps I could not have gone fast enough to the garden, and dug up a death cap or an ivory funnel, and slipped it secretly into the meal. But perhaps I could have. I want you to know that there was a chance, and that I didn’t take it.

I closed my eyes. I pressed the mushroom to my tongue. I tried to think of the place on her body it had grown, and then could not bear to, with Arthur next to me, also thinking of her skin. And the damp pop of the mushroom in his mouth.

“My God,” he said. “My compliments to the chef.”

We ate mostly in silence, all three of us swallowed in the moment, in the different weights that hung from its different arms. Closing my lips around the last mushroom, I met Agnes’s eyes. The gray of them had darkened in the evening as if under rainwater. Her mouth was slightly open. What do you want? I would have said, if Arthur wasn’t there. Tell me anything you want. It doesn’t matter what. Tell me what you want, regardless, and I will give it to you.

Beside me, Arthur started to cry.

He did it soundlessly, with a quiet catching breath. So startling, that for a moment I imagined he was sorry.