He swallowed, and his throat bobbed, muscles sliding under skin. There was a thick sweat shining on his forehead, I noticed, and beginning to trickle down his face, a drip suspended from the tip of his nose and then falling. His hand lifted, trembling, to his throat.

I backed my chair away from the table. “I didn’t.” Shaking my head already. “I didn’t.” I would go for the phone. I would call whoever needed to be called, the helivac that should have come in the first place. There are no things that cannot be forgiven.

“What?” Arthur’s voice a low rasp over gravel. “What?”

Agnes caught my wrists in her hands. Holding my arms like we were children, the two of us swaying against the shift of the world. “I did.” Her blown pupils, her strange dark eyes. “It’s okay. I did.”

“What—” Arthur tried again, and his breath was a narrow little wheeze.

“Panicking . . .” I said, “panicking doesn’t help.”

I could see him trying to make himself level, trying to make his voice stable and flat, and his body, in its panic, looking for somewhere to go. He tried to rise, too suddenly, and gasped. His poor foot.

“What did I eat?” he demanded. “What did you feed me?”

Agnes’s palms were slick. When I released her hands, just for a moment, she flinched in the absence of me, a tremble that started in one single vibration, like a quake splitting the earth, and then didn’t stop. The glisten of sweat on her cheeks was like silver. I freed one of my hands from her grip, and touched my own tongue. “Not me, right?”

“No.” And she fell against my chest. She buried her breath in my shoulder, fixed her arms tight around me. In the background, there were Arthur’s gravelly little sobs. “No, not you.”

* * *

It was a gruesome thing.

I put Agnes to bed, because she was shaking, and because there are some things we do for the people we love. In the case of the ivory funnel, the estimate is that there is enough muscarine to kill a man in one large mushroom. Agnes had put three or four, perhaps, in his dish, drizzled with balsamic. I got up from time to time to check on her. She lay very still in our bed, not weeping, watching the ceiling. I have always known my lover to be very sure in her choices. I kissed her, and I ate the shiitakes from her clavicle. I went back to Arthur, as the shock set in.