“Is he… is he…?” Roger struggled, before finally managing to utter the impossible words: “… another prospective buyer?”

Anna-Lena couldn’t bring herself to answer, so Roger spun around and lurched toward the bathroom door with such force that both Julia and Ro (Zara, helpfully, merely jumped out of the way) were obliged to hold him back with all their strength so that he couldn’t get a stranglehold on the rabbit.

“Why is my wife crying? Who are you? Are you a prospective buyer? Answer me this instant!” Roger bellowed.

He didn’t get an immediate answer, and that upset Anna-Lena as well. Roger had always been an important, respected man at work, and even his bosses had listened to him there. Retirement wasn’t something that Roger entered into voluntarily, it was something that had suddenly afflicted him. The first few months he would drive past the office, sometimes several times a day, because he was hoping to see some sign that the people inside couldn’t cope without him. He never saw one. He wasn’t at all difficult to replace, so he went home and the business carried on existing. That realization was a great burden to Roger, and made him slower.

“Answer me!” he demanded of the rabbit, but the rabbit was busy trying to take its rabbit head off. It had evidently got stuck. Beads of sweat bounced from hair to hair on his bare back, like a singularly unappealing pinball game, and his underpants were now also sitting slightly crookedly.

The bank robber stood mutely alongside and looked on, and Zara clearly felt it was time for a bit more feedback, so she gave the bank robber a shove.

“Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Like what?” the bank robber wondered.

“Take charge! What sort of hostage taker are you?” Zara demanded.

“I’m not a hostage taker, I’m a bank robber,” the bank robber whimpered.

“That turned out to be a great choice, didn’t it?”

“Please, just stop pushing me.”

“Oh, just shoot the rabbit so we can get things sorted out. So you earn a bit of respect. You only have to shoot it in the leg.”

“No, don’t shoot!” the rabbit screamed.

“Stop giving me orders,” the bank robber said.

“He could be a policeman,” Zara suggested.

“I still don’t want to…”

“Give me the pistol, then.”

“No!”

Unconcerned, Zara turned to the rabbit. “Who are you? Are you a cop, or what? Answer, or we’ll shoot.”

“I’m the one doing the shooting here! Well, I’m not, actually!” the bank robber protested.

Zara patted the bank robber condescendingly on the arm.

“Hmm. Of course you are. Of course you are.”

The bank robber stamped the floor in frustration.

“No one’s listening to me! You’re the worst hostages ever!”

“Please, don’t shoot, my head’s stuck,” Lennart cried from inside the rabbit’s head, then went on: “Anna-Lena can explain everything, we’re… I’m… I’m with her.”

* * *

Suddenly there wasn’t enough air for Roger. He turned to Anna-Lena again, so slowly that she couldn’t remember him turning to her like that since one day in the early 1990s when he realized she’d used the wrong VHS tape to record an episode of a soap opera and accidentally recorded over an important documentary about antelopes. Roger couldn’t find any words for her betrayal, either then or now. They had always been people of simple words. Anna-Lena may have hoped that would improve when they had children, but the reverse had happened. Parenthood can lead to a sequence of years when the children’s feelings suck all the oxygen out of a family, and that can be so emotionally intense that some adults go for years without having an opportunity to tell anyone about their own feelings, and if you don’t get a chance for long enough, sometimes you simply forget how to do it.

Roger’s love for Anna-Lena was visible in other ways. Little things, like checking the screws and hinges of the little mirrored door on her cabinet in the bathroom every day, so it would always open and close with the least possible resistance. At the time of day when Anna-Lena opened the cabinet she really wasn’t ready for any difficulties, Roger knew that. Anna-Lena had become interested in interior design late in life, but she had read in a book that every designer needed an “anchor” in each new scheme. Something solid and definite that everything else can build upon, spreading out from it in ever-increasing circles. For Anna-Lena, that anchor was her bathroom cabinet. Roger understood that, because he appreciated the value of immovable objects, such as load-bearing walls. You can’t make them adapt to you, you simply have to adapt to them. So Roger always unscrewed the bathroom cabinet last of all whenever they moved out of an apartment, and installed it first when they arrived at the new one. That was how he loved her. But now she was standing there, full of surprises, and confessing: “This is Lennart, and he and I… well, we’re… we have a… you weren’t ever supposed to find out, darling!”

Silence. Betrayal.

“So the two of you… you and… the two of you… behind my back?” Roger said, with some effort.

“It’s not what you think,” Anna-Lena insisted.

“Not at all what you think,” the rabbit assured him.

“It really isn’t,” Anna-Lena added.

“Well… perhaps it is a little bit, depending on what you’re thinking,” the rabbit conceded.

“Be quiet now, Lennart!” Anna-Lena said.

“Then just tell him the truth,” the rabbit suggested.

Anna-Lena breathed in through her nose and closed her eyes.

“Lennart’s just a… we got in touch on the Internet. It wasn’t supposed… it just happened, Roger.”

Roger’s arms were hanging limply by his sides, lost. In the end he turned to the bank robber, pointed at the rabbit, and whispered: “How much do you want for shooting him?”

“Can everyone please just stop telling me to shoot people?” the bank robber pleaded.

“We can make it look like an accident,” Roger said.

Anna-Lena took several desperate steps toward Roger, trying to reach his fingertips.

“Please, darling… Roger, calm down…”

Roger had no intention of calming down. He held one hand out toward the rabbit and swore: “You’re going to die! Do you hear me? You’re going to die!”

Panic-stricken, Anna-Lena blurted out the only thing she could think of that would grab his attention: “Roger, wait! If anyone dies in here, this apartment will be a murder scene and then the price per square foot might go up! People love murder scenes!”

Roger stopped at this, his fists were quivering but he took a deep breath and managed to calm down slightly. The price was always the price, after all. His shoulders sank first, followed by the rest of him, both internally and externally. He looked down at the floor and whispered: “How long has this been going on? Between you and this… this bloody rabbit?”

“A year,” Anna-Lena said.

“A year?!”

“Please, Roger, I only did it for your sake.”