Book Club First Read

Jack sinks down onto the sofa, and Jim collapses on it as if he's been pushed. Jack picks up his bag, takes out all the notes from the witness interviews, and spreads them out around him without explaining what he's doing. He reads through everything one more time. When he puts the last page down, he bites his way methodically along his tongue, because that's where Jack's stress lives.

“I'm an idiot,” he says.

“Why?” Jim wonders.

“Bloody hell! Bloody, bloody... I'm an idiot! How many people were in the apartment, Dad?”

“You mean how many prospective buyers?”

“No, I mean in total, how many people were there in total in the apartment?”

Jim starts waffling, in the hope that it will make him sound like he understands anything of all this: “Let's see… seven prospective buyers. Or, well… there were really only those two, Ro and Jules, and Roger and Anna-Lena, and Estelle, who wasn't really interested in buying the apartment…”

“That's five,” Jack nods impatiently.

“Five, yes. That's it, yes. And then there's Zara, we don't really know why she was there. And then there's Lennart, who was there because Anna-Lena had hired him. So that makes... one, two, three, four, five...”

“Seven people in total!” Jack nods.

“Plus the perpetrator,” Jim adds.

“Exactly. But also... plus the real estate agent.”

“Plus the real estate agent, yes, so that makes nine, then!” Jim says, immediately cheered by his own mathematical prowess.

“Are you sure, Dad?” Jack sighs.

He looks at his dad for a long time, waiting for him to realize, but gets no response. Absolutely none at all. Just two eyes staring at him the way they did many years ago after they'd watched a film together, and Jack had to explain at the end: "But, Dad, the bald guy was dead, that's why only the little kid could see him!" And his dad exclaimed: "What? Was he a ghost? No, he couldn't have been, because we could see him!"

She laughed at that, Jim's wife and Jack's mom, God, how she laughed. God, how they miss her. She's still the one who makes them more understanding toward each other, even though she's no longer here.

Jim aged badly after she died, became a lesser man, never quite able to breathe back in all the air that had gone out of him. When he sat in the hospital that night, life felt like an icy crevice, and when he lost his grip on the edge and slipped down into the darkness inside him, he whispered angrily to Jack: "I've tried talking to God, I really have tried, but what sort of God makes a priest this sick? She's never done anything but good for other people, so what sort of God gives an illness like this to her?!"

Jack had no answer then, and he has no answer now. He just sat quietly in the waiting room and held his dad until it was impossible to tell whose tears were running down his neck. The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn't forgive the world for living on without her.

But when it was time, Jack got to his feet, grown-up and straight-backed, walked through a series of doors, and stopped outside her room. He was a proud young man, certain in his beliefs, he wasn't religious and his mom had never said a single stern word to him about that. She was the sort of priest who got shouted at by everyone, by religious people for not being religious enough, and by everyone else because she was religious at all. She had been to sea with sailors, in the desert with soldiers, in prison with inmates, and in hospitals with sinners and atheists.

She liked a drink and could tell dirty jokes, no matter who she was with. If anyone even asked what God would think about that, she always replied: "I don't think we agree about everything, but I have a feeling He knows I'm doing the best I can. And I think maybe He knows I work for Him, because I try to help people." If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."

Her son loved her, but she never managed to get him to believe in God, because although you might be able to drum religion into people, you can't teach faith. But that night, all alone at the end of a dimly lit corridor in a hospital where she had held so many dying people by the hand, Jack sank to his knees and asked God not to take his mom away from him.

When God took her anyway, Jack went into her bed, held her hand too hard in his, as if he were hoping she might wake up and tell him off. Then he whispered disconsolately: “Don't worry, Mom, I'll take care of Dad.”

He called his sister afterward. She made promise after promise, of course, as usual. She just needed money for the flight. Obviously. Jack sent the money, but she didn't come to the funeral.

Naturally, Jim has never once called her an "addict" or "junkie," because dads can't do that. He always says his daughter is "ill," because that makes it feel better. But Jack always calls his sister what she is: a heroin addict. She's seven years older than him, and with that age gap you don't have a big sister when you're little, you have an idol. When she left home he couldn't go with her, and when she tried to find herself he couldn't help, and when she went under he couldn't save her.

It's been just Jack and Jim since then. They send her money every time she calls, every time she pretends she's going to come home, only she just needs help with the airfare, this one last time. And maybe a bit extra to pay a few little debts.

Nothing much, she's going to sort it all out, if they could just… they know they shouldn't, of course. You always know. Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope. They cling to it. Every time her dad gets a call from a number he doesn't recognize, he always hopes it's her, whereas her younger brother is terrified because he's always convinced this will be the call when someone tells him she's dead. The same questions echo through both of them: What sort of police officers can't even look after their own daughter and sister?

What sort of family can't help one of their own to help herself? What sort of god makes a priest ill, and what sort of daughter doesn't show up for the funeral?

When both children were still living at home, when everyone was still tolerably happy, Jack asked his mom one evening how she could bear to sit beside people when they were dying, in their final hours, without being able to save them. His mom kissed the top of his head and said: “How do you eat an elephant, sweetheart?” He replied the way a child who's heard the same joke a thousand times does: “One bit at a time, Mom.” She laughed just as loudly, for the thousandth time, the way parents do. Then she held his hand tightly and said: “We can't change the world, and a lot of the time we can't even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart.

We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to... be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.”

Jack couldn't help his sister. He couldn't save the man on the bridge. Those who jump... they jump.

The rest of us have to get out of bed the following day, priests walk out of the door to do their job, as do police officers. Now Jack is looking at the stage blood on the floor, the bullet hole in the wall, the little side table where the phone was lying, and the large coffee table with the discarded pizza boxes.

He looks at Jim, and his dad holds his hands up and smiles weakly.

“I give up. You're the genius here, son. What have you come up with?”

Jack nods at the pizza boxes. Brushes the hair from the lump on his forehead. Counts out the names again.

“Roger, Anna-Lena, Ro, Jules, Estelle, Zara, Lennart, the bank robber, the real estate agent. Nine people.”

“Nine people, yes.”

“But when they dropped that lime on my head, the note only asked for eight pizzas.”

Jim thinks about this so hard that his nostrils quiver.

“Maybe the bank robber doesn't like pizza?”

“Maybe.”

“But that's not what you think?”

"Why not?"

Jack stands up, packs the witness statements away in his bag. He bites his tongue.

“Is the real estate agent still at the station?”

“She should be, yes.”

“Call and make sure no one lets her go anywhere!”

Jim frowns so hard that you could lose a paper clip in the wrinkles.

“But... why, son? What's—?”

Jack interrupts his dad: “I don't think there were nine people in this apartment. I think there were eight. There's one person we've just assumed was here the whole time!

Bloody hell, Dad, don't you see? The perpetrator didn't hide, and didn't escape, either. She just walked right out into the street in front of us!”

The bank robber was sitting alone in the hall. She could hear the voices of the people she'd taken hostage, but they might as well have been in a different time zone. There were eternities between her and everyone else now, between her and the person she had been that morning.

She wasn't alone in the apartment, but no one in the world shared her prospects, and that's the greatest loneliness in the world: when no one is walking beside you toward your destination. In a short while, when they all walked out of the apartment, the others would be victims the moment their feet reached the sidewalk. She would be the criminal.

If the police didn't shoot her on sight, she'd end up stuck in prison for... she didn't even know how long... years? She'd grow old in a cell. She'd never see her daughters learn to swim.

The girls. Oh, the girls. The monkey and the frog who would grow up and have to learn to be good liars. She hoped their dad would have the sense to teach them to do that properly.

So that they could lie and say their mom was dead rather than tell the truth. She slowly removed the mask. It no longer served any purpose, she realized that, to think otherwise would be nothing but childish delusion.

She was never going to be able to escape the police. Her hair fell around her neck, damp and tangled. She weighed the pistol in her hand, clutching it harder and harder, a little at a time so she barely noticed.

Only her whitening knuckles betrayed what was happening, until her forefinger suddenly felt for the trigger. Without any great drama, she asked herself: "If this had been real, would I have shot myself?"

She didn't have time to finish the thought. Someone's fingers suddenly wrapped around hers. They didn't tear the pistol from her hand, just lowered it.

Zara stood there looking at the bank robber, neither sympathetic nor concerned, but without taking her hand off the pistol.

Ever since the start of the hostage drama, Zara had tried not to think about anything in particular, in fact she always did her best not to think about anything at all—when you're in as much pain as she has been for the past ten years, that's a vital survival skill. But something slipped through her armor when she saw the bank robber sitting there alone with the pistol. A brief memory of those hours in the office with the picture of the woman on the bridge, the psychologist looking at Zara and saying: "Do you know what, Zara? One of the most human things about anxiety is that we try to cure chaos with chaos.

Someone who has got themselves into a catastrophic situation rarely retreats from it, we're far more inclined to carry on even faster. We've created lives where we can watch other people crash into the wall but still hope that somehow we're going to pass straight through it. The closer we get, the more confidently we believe that some unlikely solution is miraculously going to save us, while everyone watching us is just waiting for the crash."

Zara looked around the office then. There were no fancy certificates hanging on the walls; for some reason it's always the people with the most impressive diplomas who keep them in their desk drawers.

So Zara asked, without any sarcasm, “Have you learned any theories about why people behave like that, then?”

“Hundreds,” the psychologist smiled.

“Which one do you believe?”

“I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”

Zara usually fought to keep all thoughts at bay, but that one slipped through. So when she found herself standing in the hall of the apartment, she put her hand around the pistol and said the kindest thing a woman in her position could say to a woman in the bank robber's position. Four words.

“Don't do anything silly.”

The bank robber looked at her, her eyes blank, her chest empty. But she didn't do anything silly. She even gave her a weak smile.

It was an unexpected moment for both of them. Zara turned and walked away quickly, almost scared, back to the balcony. She pulled a pair of headphones from her bag, put them on, and closed her eyes.

Shortly after that she ate pizza for the first time in her life. That, too, was unexpected. Capricciosa. She thought it was disgusting.

Jack jumps out of the police car while it's still moving. He storms into the police station and runs to the interview room so fast that he hits his already bruised forehead on the door because he can't get it open quickly enough. Jim comes after him, panting, trying to get his son to calm down, but there's no chance of that.

“Hello! How's tricks—?” the real estate agent begins, but Jack cuts her off by roaring:

“I know who you are now!”

“I don't underst—" the agent gasps.

"Calm down, Jack, please," Jim pants from the doorway.

"It's you!" Jack yells, showing no sign at all of calming down.

“Me?”

Jack's eyes are glinting with triumph when he leans over the table with his fists clenched in the air and hisses: “I should have realized right from the start. There was never a real estate agent in the apartment. You're the bank robber!”

Of course it was idiotic of Jack not to realize everything from the start, who the bank robber was, because it seemed so obvious to him in hindsight. Maybe it was his mom's fault. She held the two of them together, him and his dad, but perhaps that sometimes distracted him, and for some reason she had managed to get into his thoughts the whole damn time today. Just as much trouble in death as in life, that woman.

Maybe somewhere there was another priest who was more difficult than her, but there could hardly be two. She got into arguments with everyone when she was alive, maybe more with her son than anyone, and that didn't stop after her funeral. Because the people we argue with hardest of all are not the ones who are completely different from us, but the ones who are almost no different at all.

She used to travel abroad sometimes, after disasters when aid organizations needed volunteers, to the constant accompaniment of criticism from all directions both inside and outside the church. She either shouldn't help at all or ought to be doing it somewhere else. Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort. One time she was on the other side of the world and got caught up in a riot and tried to help a bleeding woman get away, and in the chaos she herself got stabbed in the arm.

She was taken to the hospital, managed to borrow a phone, and called home. Jim was sitting in front of the news, waiting. He listened patiently, as usual happy and relieved that she was okay.

But when Jack realized what had happened, he grabbed the phone and shouted so loudly that the line began to shriek with feedback: "Why did you have to go there? Why do you have to risk your life? Why don't you ever think about your family?"

His mom realized, of course, that her son was shouting out of fear and concern, so she replied the way she often did: “Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that's not what boats were built for.”

Jack said something he instantly regretted: “Do you think God's going to protect you against knives just because you're a priest?”

She may have been sitting in a hospital on the other side of the world, but she could still feel his bottomless terror. So her whispers were half washed away by tears when she replied: “God doesn't protect people from knives, sweetheart. That's why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”

It was impossible to argue with such a stubborn woman. Jack hated how much he admired her sometimes. Jim, in turn, loved her so much he could hardly breathe.

But she didn't travel so much after that, and never went so far away again. Then she got sick, and they lost her, and the world lost a bit more of its protection.

So when the hostage drama started, when Jack and Jim were standing out in the street the day before New Year's Eve, outside the apartment block, and had just been told by their bosses to wait for the Stockholmer, the two of them were thinking a lot about her and what she would have done if she'd been there. And when that lime came flying out and hit Jack on the forehead and they realized that the note wrapped around it was an order for pizza, they both concluded that a better opportunity to get in contact with the bank robber was unlikely to arise. So Jack called the negotiator. And, despite the fact that he was a Stockholmer, he agreed that they were right.

“Yes, well, delivering pizzas could be an opening for communication, it certainly could. What about the bomb in the stairwell, though?” he wondered.

“It's not a bomb!” Jack said confidently.

“Would you swear on that?”

“Using whatever swearwords you'd care to choose, and I can tell you that my mom taught me quite a lot of those. This perpetrator isn't dangerous. Just scared.”

"How do you know that?"

“Because if he'd been dangerous, if he'd been aware of what he was doing, then he wouldn't have ordered pizzas for all the hostages by throwing limes at us. Let me go in and talk to him, I can…” Jack paused. He'd been about to say I can save everyone. But he swallowed hard and said instead: “I can fix this. I can sort this out.”

“Have you spoken to all the neighbors?” the negotiator wondered.

“The rest of the building is empty,” Jack assured him.

The negotiator was still stuck in traffic on the motorway, far too many miles away, not even police cars were able to get through, so in the end he agreed to Jack's plan. But he also demanded that Jack somehow get a phone into the apartment, so that the negotiator himself could call the bank robber and negotiate the release of the hostages. And take the glory when everything turns out okay, Jack thought sullenly.

“I've got a decent phone,” Jack said, because he had the one Jim called the special telephone thingy that got a bloody signal where there wasn't a bloody signal.

“I'll call after they've had the pizzas, it's easier to negotiate when people have eaten,” the negotiator said, as if that were what you learned on negotiation courses these days.

“What do we do if he doesn't open the door when we get there?” Jack wondered.

“Then you leave the pizzas and phone out on the landing.”

“How can we be sure he'll take the phone inside the apartment?” Jack asked.

"Why wouldn't he?"

“Do you think he's made rational, logical decisions so far? He might get stressed and think the phone is some sort of trap.”

That was when Jim suddenly had an idea. Which surprised him as much as anyone.

“We can put it in one of the pizza boxes!” he suggested.

Jack looked at his dad in shock for several seconds. Then he nodded and said into the phone: “We'll put the phone in one of the pizza boxes.”

“Yes, that's a good idea,” the negotiator agreed.

“It was my dad's,” Jack said proudly.

Jim turned away so his son wouldn't see how embarrassed he was. He looked up local pizzerias on Google, called one of them, and explained the highly unconventional order: eight pizzas and one of the uniforms the delivery guys usually wore. However, Jim made the mistake of saying he was a police officer, and the owner of the pizzeria, who was perfectly capable of reading the local news on social media, was quick-witted enough to say that he gave a discount for bulk orders on pizzas, but charged twice as much for hiring out uniforms. Jim asked angrily if the owner was a character in an English Christmas story from the mid-nineteenth century, and the owner calmly countered by asking if Jim was familiar with the concept of “supply and demand.” When the pizzas and outfit finally arrived, Jack grabbed at them, but Jim refused to let go.

“What are you playing at? I'm the one going in!” Jack said firmly.

Jim shook his head.

“No. I still think that might be a bomb in the stairwell. So I'm the one going in.”

“Why would you go in there if you think it's a bomb? For God's sake, I'm going…,” Jack began, but his dad refused to back down.

“You're certain it isn't a bomb, aren't you, son?”

“Yes!”

“Well, then. It doesn't make any difference if I go in.”

“What are you, eleven years old?”

"Are you?"

Jack tried desperately to think of a counterargument.

“I can't let you...”

Jim was already changing clothes, in the middle of the street even though the temperature was below freezing. They didn't look at each other.

“Your mom would never have forgiven me if I let you go in,” Jim said, looking down at the ground.

“Do you think she would have forgiven me if I let you go in, then? You were her husband,” Jack said, looking down the street.

Jim looked up at the sky.

“But she was your mom.”

There was no arguing with him sometimes, the old bastard.

50

The police station. The interview room. All the blood has drained from the real estate agent's face now. She looks terrified.

“Ba-ba-bank robber? M-m-me? H-h-how c-c-could I...”

Jack is marching around the room, waving his arms as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra, incredibly pleased with himself.

“How did I not see this right at the start? You don't know anything. Everything you've said about the apartment has been complete gibberish. No real real estate agent could be this bad at their job!”

The real estate agent looks like she's about to start crying.

“I'm doing my best, okay? Do you have any idea how hard it is being a real estate agent during a recession?”

Jack fixes his eyes on her.

“But that's not what you are, is it? Because you're a bank robber!”

The agent looks in despair over at Jim in the doorway, trying to get some sort of support. But Jim merely looks back at her unhappily. Meanwhile Jack bangs both fists down on the table and glares furiously at the Realtor.

“I should have realized right from the start. When the other witnesses were talking about the hostage drama, they didn't even mention you. Because you were never there.

Admit it! We allowed ourselves to be distracted when you asked for those fireworks, and then you walked right out of that apartment, in front of our very eyes. Tell me the truth!”

The truth? It's hardly ever as complicated as we think. We just hope it is, because then we feel smarter if we can work it out in advance. This is a story about a bridge, and idiots, and a hostage drama, and an apartment viewing. But it's also a love story. Several, in fact.

The last time Zara saw her psychologist before the hostage drama, she arrived early. She was never late, but it was unusual for her not to walk in at precisely the agreed time.

“Has anything happened?” Nadia wondered.

“What do you mean?” Zara replied contrarily.

“You're not usually early. Is anything wrong?”

“Isn't it your job to work that out?”

Nadia sighed.

“I was only asking.”

“Is that kale?”

Nadia looked down into the plastic tub on her desk. Nodded.

“I'm having lunch.”

Other patients might have taken this as a hint. Not Zara, of course.

"So you're vegan," she said, without a question mark.

The psychologist coughed, the way you do if your throat takes offense at you being predictable.

“I don't have to be, do I? I mean, I am vegan, but surely other people eat kale?”

Zara wrinkled her nose.

“But that was bought in a carryout. So you could have chosen anything. But you chose kale.”

“And only vegans do that?”

“I can only assume that lack of vitamins affects your financial judgment.”

Nadia smiled at that.

“So you look down on me because I'm a vegan, or because I pay for vegan food?”

Nadia swallowed the last bit of both the kale and her self-esteem, closed the lid of the tub, and asked, “How have you been feeling since we last met, Zara?”

Rather than reply Zara took a small bottle of hand sanitizer from her bag, carefully massaged her fingers with her back to the desk, looked at the bookcase, and declared: “For a psychologist, you have an awful lot of books that aren't about psychology.”

“And what are the others about, in your opinion?”

“Identity. That's why you're a vegan.”

“It's possible to be vegan for other reasons.”

“Such as?”

“It's good for the environment.”

“Maybe. But I think people like you are vegan because it makes you feel good. It's probably why you've got poor posture, too little calcium.”

Nadia discreetly adjusted her position on her chair, and did her best not to look like she was trying to sit up straighter.

“You pay for your time here, Zara. For someone who criticizes other people's financial choices, you seem remarkably happy to throw away quite a lot of money on talking about... me. Do you want to talk about why?”

Zara seemed to consider this seriously, without taking her eyes off the bookcase.

“Maybe next time.”

“That's good to hear.”

“What is?”

“That there's going to be a next time.”

Zara turned around at that and peered at Nadia to see if that was a joke or not. She didn't quite succeed, so turned away again, rubbed more sanitizer into her hands, and looked out of the window behind Nadia, counting the windows in the building opposite. Then she said: “You haven't suggested I start taking antidepressants. Most psychologists would have.”

“Have you met many other psychologists?”

"No."

“So that's your own analysis?”

Zara looked at the picture on the wall.

“I can understand you not wanting to give me sleeping pills, because you're worried I'd kill myself. But surely if that's the case, you should be giving me antidepressants instead?”

Nadia folded two unused paper napkins and tucked them away in her desk drawer. Then nodded.

“You're right. I haven't suggested medication. Because antidepressants are designed to smooth out the highs and lows of your mood, and if used properly they can stop you feeling so sad, but often they stop you feeling as happy.” She held one hand up, her palm horizontal. “You just end up… on a level. And you would expect that patients who take antidepressants mostly miss the highs, wouldn't you? But that isn't actually the case.

The majority of people who want to stop medication say they want to be able to cry again. They watch a sad film with someone they love, and they want to be able to… feel the same thing.”

“I don't like films,” Zara pointed out.

Nadia laughed out loud.

“No, of course you don't. But I don't think you need fewer feelings, Zara. I think you need to feel more. I don't think you're depressed. I think you're lonely.”

“That sounds like an unprofessional analysis.”

“Maybe.”

“What if I leave here and kill myself.”

“I don't think you'd do that.”

“No?”

“You said a little while ago that there's going to be a next time.”

Zara focused her gaze on Nadia's chin.

“And you trust me?”

"Why?"

“Because I can see that you don't want to let people get close to you. It makes you feel weak. But I don't think you're afraid of being hurt, I think you're afraid of hurting other people. You're a more empathetic and moral person than you like to admit.”

Zara was deeply, deeply offended by this, and had difficulty working out if that was because Nadia had called her weak, or because she had said she was moral.

“Maybe I just don't think it's worth the effort to talk to people I'm only going to get fed up with.”

“How do you know that if you never try?”

“I'm here, aren't I, and it didn't take me long to get fed up with you!”

“Try to take the question seriously,” Nadia said, which of course was hopeless. Zara bounced away from the subject as usual.

“So why are you vegan?”

Nadia groaned wearily.

“Do we really have to talk about that again? Okay: I'm vegan because I care about the climate crisis. If everyone was vegan, we could...”

Zara interrupted scornfully: "Stop the ice caps melting?"

Nadia deployed the patience vegans have plenty of time to practice when they spend Christmas with older relatives.

“Not quite, no. But it's part of a larger solution. And the fact that the ice caps are melting is—”

“But do we really need penguins?” Zara asked bluntly.

“I would say that the ice caps are a symptom, not the problem. Like the trouble you have sleeping.”

Zara counted the windows.

“There are frogs threatened with extinction that scientists say would leave us smothered with insects if they disappeared. But penguins? Who'd be affected if penguins disappeared, except maybe businesses that make padded jackets?”

Nadia lost the thread at that, which may have been Zara's intention.

“You don't make... what... do you think they make padded jackets out of penguins? They're made of geese!”

“So geese aren't as important as penguins? That doesn't sound very vegan.”

“That's not what I said!”

“That's what it sounded like.”

“You're making a habit of this, you know.”

“What?”

“Changing the subject as soon as you get close to talking about real feelings.”

Zara seemed to consider this. Then she said: “What about bears, then?”

"Sorry?"

“If you get attacked by a bear? Could you kill it then?”

"Why would I be attacked by a bear?"

“Maybe someone kidnaps you and drugs you and you wake up in a cage with a bear, and it's a fight to the death.”

“You're starting to get quite disconcerting now. And I'd like to point out that I've had an awful lot of training in psychology, so I have a fairly high threshold for what counts as disconcerting.”

“Stop being so sensitive. Answer the question: Could you kill a bear then, even if you didn't want to eat it? I'm not saying you've got a fork, but if you had a knife?”

Nadia groaned. "You're doing it again."

“What?”

Nadia looked at the time. Zara noticed. She counted all the windows twice. Nadia noticed. They looked past each other for a while until Nadia said: “Let me ask you this, then: Do you think you mock the green movement this way because it's the opposite of the finance industry you work in?”

Zara bit back faster than she herself was expecting, because sometimes you don't know how strongly you feel about something until you're tested: "The green movement doesn't need any help to look ridiculous! And I'm not defending the finance industry, I'm defending the economic system."

“What's the difference?”

“One is the symptom. The other is the problem.”

Nadia nodded as if she understood what that meant.

“Surely we created the economic system? It's a construct?”

Zara's reply was surprisingly free from condescension, and almost sounded sympathetic.

“That's the problem. We made it too strong. We forgot how greedy we are. Do you own an apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Have you got a mortgage on it?”

“Hasn't everyone?”

“No. And a mortgage used to be something you were expected to repay. But now that every other middle-income family has a mortgage for an amount they couldn't possibly save up in their lifetimes, then the bank isn't lending money anymore. It's offering financing. And then homes are no longer homes. They're investments.”

“I'm not sure I completely understand what that means.”

“It means that the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the real class divide is between those who can borrow money and those who can't. Because no matter how much money anyone earns, they still lie awake at the end of the month worrying about money. Everyone looks at what their neighbors have and wonders, 'How can they afford that?' because everyone is living beyond their means.

So not even really rich people ever feel really rich, because in the end the only thing you can buy is a more expensive version of something you've already got. With borrowed money.”

Nadia looked like a cat who'd just seen someone skating for the first time.

“I heard a man who worked in a casino say that no one gets ruined by losing, they get ruined by trying to win back the money they lost. Is that what you mean? Is that why the stock market and housing market crash?”

Zara shrugged.

“Sure. If that makes it feel better.”

Then the psychologist suddenly, and without quite knowing why, asked a question that knocked the air out of her patient's lungs: “So do you feel more guilty about the customers you haven't lent money to, or the ones you've lent too much to?”

Zara looked untroubled, but she was holding on to the arms of the chair so tightly that when she eventually let go her palms were bloodless. She hid it by rubbing them, and evaded eye contact by counting windows. Then she let out a quick snort.

“You know something? If people who worry about animal welfare were really bothered about animal welfare, they wouldn't tell me to eat happy pigs.”

Nadia rolled her eyes. "I don't see what that's got to do with my question."

Zara shrugged.

“All this talk about organic farming, adverts for free-range chickens and happy pigs... isn't it more unethical of me to eat a happy pig? Surely it's better if I eat a pig that's lived a terrible life than one of those carpe diem pigs with a family and friends? The farmers say happy pigs taste better, so I can only assume that they wait until the pig has just fallen in love, maybe just after it's had kids, when it's at its absolute happiest, and then it gets shot in the head and vacuum packed. How ethical is that?”

The psychologist sighed.

“I'll take that to mean that you don't want to talk about your customers and how much they've borrowed.”

Zara dug her fingernails hard into her palms.

“Have you ever thought about how vegans always talk about saving the planet, as if the planet needed you? The planet will survive for billions of years even without human help. The only people we're killing are ourselves.”

It wasn't much of an answer, as usual. Nadia looked at the time, then regretted doing so at once because Zara noticed and got to her feet, as usual. Zara never liked to be asked to leave, and that tends to make you more alert to the way people check the time, and the second time they look you get to your feet. Nadia felt embarrassed and stammered, “We've got some time left... if you'd like... I haven't another appointment after this.”

“Well, I've got things to do,” Zara replied.

Nadia composed herself and asked straight out, “Can you tell me one personal thing about yourself?”

"Sorry?"

Nadia stood up and moved her head in an attempt to catch Zara's eye.

“In all the time we've spent talking to each other, I get the sense that you've never told me anything truly personal about yourself. Anything at all. What's your favorite color? Do you like art? Have you ever been in love?”

Zara's eyebrows rose as far as they could go.

“Do you think I'd sleep better if I were in love?”

Nadia burst out laughing.

“No. I was just wondering. I know very little about you.”

Of all the moments they shared, this was one of the most remarkable.

Zara stood behind her chair for several minutes. Then she took a deep breath and actually told Nadia something about herself that she had never told anyone: "I like music. I play... music, very loud, as soon as I get home. It helps me gather my thoughts."

"Only when you get home?"

“I can't play it that loud in the office. It only works if I listen to it at very, very high volume.”

Zara tapped her forehead as she said that, as if to illustrate what it was that didn't work.

“What sort of music?” Nadia asked gently.

“Death metal.”

“Wow.”

“Is that a professional opinion?”

Nadia giggled, which was embarrassing and highly unprofessional—you certainly aren't taught how to giggle in psychology courses.

“It was just so incredibly unexpected. Why death metal?”

“It's so loud that it makes your head silent.”

Zara's knuckles turned white around the handle of her handbag. Nadia noticed, so she pulled a pad of paper from one of her desk drawers, wrote something, and handed Zara a note.

“Is that a prescription for sleeping pills?” Zara asked.

Nadia shook her head.

“It's the name of a good pair of headphones. There's an electronics store down the street. Buy them, then you can listen to music no matter where you are, as soon as things start to feel difficult. Maybe that would help you to get out more? Meet people? Maybe even... fall in love.”

Of course the psychologist regretted saying that last bit at once. Zara didn't respond. She tucked the note in her handbag, stared at the letter at the bottom of it, closed it quickly. As she was leaving Nadia called out anxiously, worried that she had gone too far:

“You don't have to fall in love, Zara, that wasn't what I meant! I just meant it might be time to try something new. I just think you should give yourself… just give yourself the chance of… getting fed up with someone!”

Zara stood in the elevator. As the doors closed she thought about loans. The ones we grant and the ones we refuse. Then she pressed the emergency stop button.

While the hostage drama was going on, out in the street Jack was trying to think of some other way to contact the bank robber rather than let Jim go up with the pizzas. He thought and thought and thought, because young men may be absolutely certain about almost everything nearly all of the time, but even for Jack it would have been easier to be one hundred percent certain that the bomb wasn't a bomb if he didn't need to send his dad into the stairwell to test the theory.

“Hang on, Dad, I've...,” he began, then raised his phone and said to the negotiator: “Before we go in with the pizzas I want to try to get a better idea of what's going on. I can get into the building that's on the other side of the street. I might be able to see into the stairwell windows from there.”

The negotiator sounded skeptical.

“What difference would that make?”

“None, maybe,” Jack admitted. “But I might be able to tell if it's a bomb or not through the window, and before I send my colleague in I want to know that I've exhausted all options.”

The negotiator put his hand over his phone and talked to someone else, one of the bastard bosses, perhaps. Then he came back and said: “Yes. Okay, yes.”

He didn't tell Jack that he was impressed that he had called his dad his "colleague" in such a critical situation, but he was.

So Jack went into the building on the other side of the street. The negotiator stayed on the line, and one and a half floors later he wondered: “What... what are you doing?”

“I'm going up the stairs,” Jack replied.

“Isn't there an elevator?”

“I don't like elevators.”

The negotiator sounded like he was hitting his head with his phone.

“So you're prepared to go into a building containing a bomb and an armed bank robber, but you're scared of elevators?”

Jack hissed back: “I'm not scared of elevators! I'm scared of snakes and cancer. I just don't like elevators!”

The negotiator sounded like he was grinning.

“Can't you call in reinforcements?”

“All the staff we have at our disposal are here, the whole lot. They're maintaining the cordon and evacuating the surrounding buildings. I've called in backup, but they're both waiting for their wives.”

“What does that mean?”

“That they've been drinking. Their wives will have to drive them here.”

“Drinking? At this time of day? The day before New Year's Eve?” the negotiator wondered.

“I don't know how you do it in Stockholm, but here we take New Year's seriously,” Jack replied.

The negotiator laughed.

“Stockholmers don't take anything seriously, you know that. At least, nothing important.”

Jack grinned. He hesitated briefly as he went up a few more steps before asking the question he had been wanting to ask for a while.

“Have you been involved in a hostage drama before?”

The negotiator hesitated before replying.

“Yes. Yes, I have.”

“How did it end?”

“He let the hostages go and came out after we'd spent four hours talking.”

Jack nodded tersely and stopped at the next-to-last floor. He peered out of the landing window through a small pair of binoculars. He could see the wires on the floor of the landing opposite, they were hanging out of a box that someone had written something on with a marker. He wasn't absolutely certain, but from where he was standing it looked very much like the letters C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S.

“It isn't a bomb,” he said into his phone.

“What do you think it is, then?”

“Looks like outdoor Christmas lights.”

“Well, then.”

Jack carried on up to the top floor—if the bank robber hadn't closed the blinds, he might be able to see into the apartment.

“How did you get him out?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The hostage taker. Last time.”

“Oh. All the usual, I suppose, a combination of what you get taught. Don't use negatives, avoid can't and won't. Try to find something you've got in common. Find out what his motivation is.”

“Was that really how you got him out?”

“No, of course not. I was joking.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. We talked for four hours and then he suddenly fell silent. And of course that's the first thing we get taught...”

“To keep him occupied? Not to let the line go quiet?”

“Exactly. I didn't know what to do, so I took a chance and asked if he wanted to hear a funny story. He said nothing for a minute or so, then he said: 'Well? Are you going to tell me or not?' So I told him the one about the two Irish guys in a boat, if you know that one?”

“No,” Jack said.

“Okay, two Irish brothers are out at sea fishing. A storm blows up, and they lose both oars, they're convinced they're going to drown. Then suddenly one of the brothers spots something in the water, and manages to grab hold of a bottle. They pull the cork out and Poof! A genie appears. He grants them one wish, anything they want.

So the two brothers look around at the stormy sea, they're stuck out there with no oars, several miles from shore, and the first brother is thinking about what to ask for when the second brother cheerfully blurts out: “I wish the whole sea was Guinness!” The genie stares at him like he's an idiot, then says, okay, sure, let's go for that. And Poof! The sea turns into Guinness. The genie vanishes. The first brother stares at the second brother and snaps: “You bloody idiot! We had one single wish and you wished the sea was Guinness! Do you have any idea what you've done?" The second brother shakes his head in shame. The first brother throws his arms out and says..."

The negotiator left a dramatic pause, but didn't have time to deliver the punch line before Jack cut in from the other end of the line.

“Now we have to piss in the boat!”

The negotiator let out an affronted snort so loud that the phone shook.

“So you had heard it after all?”

“My mom liked funny stories. Is that really what got the hostage taker to give up?”

The line was quiet a little too long.

“Maybe he was worried I was going to tell him another one.”

The negotiator sounded like he wanted to laugh as he was saying this, but didn't quite succeed. Jack couldn't help noticing. He had reached the top floor now, and looked out of the window at the balcony on the other side of the street. He stopped in surprise.

“What the...? That's weird.”

“What?”

“I can see the balcony of the apartment where the hostages are being held. There's a woman standing on it.”

“A woman?”

“Yes. Wearing headphones.”

“Headphones?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of headphones?”

“How many different types are there? What difference does that make?”

The negotiator sighed.

“Okay. Stupid question. How old is she, then?”

“Fifties. Older, maybe.”

“Older than fifty, or older than in her fifties?”

“For God's... I don't know! A woman. A perfectly ordinary woman.”

“Okay, okay, calm down. Does she look scared?”

“She looks... bored. She definitely doesn't look like she's in any danger, anyway.”

“That sounds like an odd hostage situation.”

“Exactly. And that definitely isn't a bomb in the stairwell. And he tried to rob a cashless bank. I said from the start, we're not dealing with a professional here.”

The negotiator considered this for a few moments.

“Yes, you might well be right.”

He was trying to sound confident, but Jack could hear his doubt. The two men shared a long silence before Jack said, “Tell me the truth. What happened in that last hostage drama you were involved in?”

The negotiator sighed.

“The man released the hostages. But he shot himself before we managed to get in.”

Those words would follow Jack throughout the day, right next to his skin.

He had started to walk back down the stairs by the time the negotiator cleared his throat.

“Okay, Jack, can I ask you a question? Why did you turn down that job in Stockholm?”

Jack considered lying, but couldn't summon up the energy.

“How do you know about that?”

“I talked to one of the bosses before I set off. Asked her who was on the scene locally. She said I should talk to Jack, because he's bloody good. She said she'd offered you a job several times, but that you keep turning it down.”

“I've got a job.”

"Not like the one she's offering."

Jack snorted defensively.

“Oh, all you Stockholmers think the world revolves around your bloody city.”

The negotiator laughed.

“Listen, I grew up in a village where you had to drive forty minutes if you wanted to buy milk. Back there we used to think your town was metropolitan. To us, you were the Stockholmers.”

“Everyone is someone else's Stockholmer, I guess.”

“So what's your problem, then? Are you worried you wouldn't be able to cope with the job if you took it?”

Jack rubbed his hands on his pants.

“Are you my psychologist or something?”

"Sounds like you could do with one."

“Can't we just focus on the job in hand?”

The negotiator hesitated and took a deep breath before asking: “Does your dad know you've been offered another job?”

Jack was about to swear, but the negotiator never got to hear what, because at that moment Jack looked out of the window in the stairwell and saw that his dad was no longer waiting in the street like he'd been told.

“What the bell?!” Jack exclaimed. Then he ended the call and ran.

Lara had just stepped out onto the balcony when Jack saw her. That was just after she had told the bank robber out in the hall not to do anything silly, and she needed fresh air, more than ever. If all you saw was the rear view of Zara heading toward the balcony, you'd probably think she was impatient.

You needed to see her face to understand that she was feeling fragile. She had surprised herself back there, had lost control, felt things. For anyone else that might perhaps merely have been vaguely uncomfortable, like when you discover you're starting to share the same taste in music as your parents, or biting into something you think is chocolate but turns out to be liver pâté, but for Zara it unleashed a feeling of complete panic. Was she starting to develop a sense of empathy?

She rubbed her hands carefully with sanitizer, counted the windows of the building on the other side of the street over and over again, tried to take deep breaths. She had been in the apartment too long, these people had shrunk her customary distance, and she wasn't used to that. Out on the balcony she pressed herself up against the wall of the building so no one down in the street could see her over the railing. She clamped the headphones over her ears and turned the volume up until the shrieking noise of the music drowned out the shrieking noise inside her head. Until the bass was thudding harder than her heart.

And just there, perhaps she found it. A truce with herself.

She could see winter making itself comfortable across the town. She liked the silence of this time of year, but had never appreciated its smugness. When the snow arrives autumn has already done all the work, taking care of all the leaves and carefully sweeping summer away from people's memories. All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who's spent twenty minutes next to a barbecue but has never served a full meal in his life.

She didn't hear the balcony door open, but she felt a furry ear on her hair as Lennart stepped out and stood beside her. He tapped gently on one of the earphones.

“What?” she snapped.

“Do you smoke?” Lennart asked, because even though he hadn't managed to remove the rabbit's head, there was a small hole in the snout that he was fairly certain he'd be able to smoke through.

“Certainly not!” Zara said, putting the headphone back over her ear.

Lennart was surprised, even if that wasn't visible through the unchanging ambivalence of the rabbit's head. Zara looked like someone who smoked, not because she liked it so much as to make the air worse for other people. The rabbit tapped on the headphone again and she removed it with the utmost reluctance.

“What are you doing out on the balcony, then?” he wondered.

Zara took a long, hard look at him, starting from his white socks, via his bare legs and his nonelasticated underpants, to his bare torso, where the chest hair had started to go gray.

“Do you really think you're in any position to question other people's life choices?” she asked, but didn't sound anywhere near as annoyed as she had hoped, which was annoying.

He scratched his big, lifeless rabbit's ears and replied: "I don't smoke, either, not really. Just at parties. And when I'm being held hostage!"

He laughed, she didn't. He fell silent. She put the headphone back on her ear, but of course he tapped on it again immediately.

“Can I stand out here with you for a while? I'm worried Roger might hit me again if I go back in there.”

Zara didn't answer, just put the headphone back in place, and the rabbit tapped on it at once.

“Are you here on safari, then?”

She glared at him in surprise.

“What does that mean?”

“Just an observation. There's always someone like you at every apartment viewing. Someone who doesn't want the apartment, but is just curious. On safari. Test-driving a lifestyle. You get to recognize that sort of thing in my job.”

The look in Zara's eyes was poisonous, but her mouth remained closed. Being seen through isn't pleasant, you tend to pull your clothes a little tighter when it happens, especially if you're usually the one who sees through other people. Her instinct was to say something cruel to put a bit of distance between them, but instead she found herself asking: “Aren't you cold?”

He shook his head and she had to duck to avoid one of his ears. Then he patted his furry face and chuckled: “Nope. They say seventy percent of your body heat gets lost through your head, so seeing as I'm stuck in here, I suppose I'm only losing thirty percent right now.”

That isn't the sort of thing a man dressed in tight underwear usually boasts about in freezing temperatures, Zara noted. She put the headphones back on again, hoping that would be enough to get rid of him, but even before he tapped on the headphone again she had already guessed that his next sentence was going to start with the word “I.”

“I'm really an actor. This business of disrupting apartment viewings is only a sideline.”

“How interesting,” Zara said in a tone that only the child of a telesales operative would interpret as an invitation to go on talking.

“Times are tough for people in the cultural sector,” the rabbit nodded.

Zara pulled the headphones down around her neck in resignation and snorted.

“So that's your excuse for exploiting the fact that times are tough for people selling apartments, too? How come you people in the 'cultural sector' never think capitalism is any good except when you're the ones profiting from it?”

It just slipped out, she didn't really know why. Between his ears she caught a glimpse of the bridge. The ears wavered thoughtfully in the December wind.

“Sorry, but you don't strike me as the sort of person who feels sorry for people trying to sell apartments,” he said.

Zara snorted again, more angrily.

“I don't care about sellers or buyers. But I do care about the fact that you don't seem to appreciate that your 'sideline' is manipulating the economic system!”

The rabbit's head was stuck in a rictus grin while Lennart was thinking hard inside it. Then he said what Zara considered to be the stupidest thing that could ever come out of anyone's mouth, rabbit or human: “What have I got to do with the economic system?”

Zara massaged her hands. Counted the windows.

“The market is supposed to be self-regulating, but people like you spoil the balance between supply and demand,” she said wearily.

Of course the rabbit responded at once by saying the most predictable thing possible: “That's not true. If I wasn't doing this, someone else would. I'm not breaking the law. An apartment is the largest investment most people make, and they want the best price, so I'm just offering a service that—”

“Apartments aren't supposed to be investments,” Zara replied gloomily.

“What are they supposed to be, then?”

“Homes.”

“Are you some sort of communist?” the rabbit chuckled.

Zara felt like punching him on the nose for that, but instead she pointed between his ears and said: “When the financial crisis hit ten years ago, a man jumped off that bridge because of a property market crash on the other side of the world. Innocent people lost their jobs and the guilty were given bonuses. You know why?”

“Now you're exaggerat—”

“Because people like you don't care about the balance in the system.”

Lennart chuckled superciliously inside the rabbit's head. He still hadn't realized who he'd embarked on a discussion with.

“You need to calm down, the financial crisis was the banks' fault, I don't make the—”

“I've rules? Is that what you were about to say? You don't make the rules, you just play the game?” Zara interrupted wearily, seeing as she'd rather drink nitroglycerin and go on a trampoline than have to listen to yet another man lecturing her about financial responsibilities.

“Yes! Well, no! But...”

Zara had spent enough of her life in committee rooms with the target market for cuff links to be able to predict the rest of this guy's monologue, so she decided to save her time and his larynx: "Let me guess where you're going with this: you don't care about the seller of this apartment, you don't care about Roger and Anna-Lena, either, you only care about yourself. But you're going to try to defend yourself by saying that it isn't possible to cheat the housing market, because the market doesn't really exist, it's a construct. Just numbers on a computer screen. So you don't have any responsibility, do you?"

“No…,” Lennart began, but didn't even manage to take a breath before Zara stormed on.

“Then you'll dredge up some pop-psychological nonsense about money not having any value because that's also a construct. And then we get to the history lesson, where clever old you gets to teach silly, ignorant me about economic theory and how the stock market came about. Maybe you feel like telling me about Hanoi 1902, when the city tried to fight a plague of rats by offering the inhabitants a reward for every rat they killed and whose tail they handed over to the police. And what did that lead to? People started breeding rats!

Do you have any idea how many men have told me that story to illustrate how selfish and untrustworthy ordinary people are? Do you know how many men like you every single woman on the planet meets every day, who think that every thought that pops into your tiny little male brains is a lovely present you can give us?”

Lennart had backed away three steps toward the railing by this point. But Zara had got into her stride now, so all he had time to say was: “I—,” before she snapped: “You what? You what? You're not the greedy one, everyone else is? Is that what you were about to say?”

The rabbit shook its ears.

“No. No, I'm sorry. I didn't know anyone had jumped off that bridge. Did you know...?”

Zara's cheeks were throbbing, her throat was bright red beneath the headphones. She was no longer talking to Lennart, but exactly who she was talking to probably wasn't clear even to her, but it felt like she'd been waiting ten years to yell at someone. Anyone at all. Herself most of all. So she roared: "People like you and me are the problem, don't you get that? We always defend ourselves by saying we're only offering a service. That we're just one tiny part of the market. That everything is people's own fault.

That they're greedy, that they shouldn't have given us their money. And then we have the nerve to wonder why stock markets crash and the city is full of rats..."

Her eyes were wild with rage, and little clouds of smoke kept puffing breathlessly out of her nostrils. The rabbit didn't reply, those unblinking eyes just looked at her as she tried to get her pulse under control. Then there was a hacking sound from inside the head, and at first Zara thought the old bastard was having a stroke, then realized that this was what Lennart sounded like when he was laughing, really properly, from deep in his stomach. He held his arms out.

“I don't know what you're talking about anymore, to be honest. But I give up, you win, you win!”

Zara's eyes narrowed, from fear as much as anger. It was easier to talk to the rabbit than other people, because she didn't have to look Lennart in the eye. She wasn't prepared for what that was going to do to her. She leaned forward and stretched her fingers out on her thighs, bent and straightened them, over and over again. Then she said in a quieter voice: “I win, do I? Do Anna-Lena and Roger win? He's trying to get rich and she's trying to make him happy, and all they're really doing is postponing an inevitable divorce. But that probably just makes you happy, because then they'll have to buy two apartments.”

At that, something happened. Lennart raised his voice for the first time.

“No! That's not enough! Because... because... I don't believe that!”

“So what do you believe, then?” Zara snapped back, and—regardless of whatever it was that had led her to this point—her voice finally broke. She screwed her eyes shut and clenched her fists around the headphones. She had been waiting ten years for someone to ask her that question. So it almost floored her when he said:

“Love.”

Lennart picked up and dropped the word so carelessly, as if it weren't a big deal at all. Zara wasn't prepared for it, and that sort of thing can make a person angry. Lennart's voice became more muffled inside the rabbit's head, hurt now: “You're talking like I'd be happy if people got divorced. No one can go to two thousand apartment viewings and not realize that there's more love in the world than the opposite.”

Not even Zara had an answer to that. And he still didn't seem to be freezing, the idiot in the rabbit's head, which just made her more annoyed. Stop talking about love and feel cold, for God's sake, like any normal idiot, she thought, and prepared to fire back with some devastating remark. But all she heard herself ask was: "What do you base that on?"

The rabbit's ears quivered.

“All the apartments that aren't for sale.”

Zara's fingers fumbled around her neck. It wasn't an entirely ridiculous answer, which obviously annoyed her. Why couldn't Lennart have the decency to be a complete idiot? An idiot who is also a romantic is almost unbearable, and that “almost” can drive a woman with headphones mad.

So she remained silent, gazing off toward the bridge. Then she let out a resigned sigh and pulled two cigarettes out from her bag. She stuck one in the rabbit's snout and the other in her own mouth.

The rabbit was smart enough not to start going on about her earlier claim that she didn't smoke. She appreciated that. When she gave him the lighter he managed to sing the fur on his nose and had to pat the flames out with his hands. She appreciated that as well.

They smoked without any sense of urgency. Then Lennart said, heavily but with no trace of accusation, as he looked out across the rooftops: “You can think what you like about me, but Anna-Lena is one of the few clients I've got who I… can't help rooting for. She doesn't want to make her husband rich, she just wants to make him feel needed. Everyone takes it for granted that she's submissive and oppressed and that she's always had to stand back and make sacrifices for his career, but do you know what job she used to do?”

“No,” Zara confessed.

“She was a senior analyst for a big American industrial company. I didn't believe it at first, because she's as scatty as a box of kittens… but you won't find a smarter, better-educated person in this apartment, I can assure you of that. When their kids were young his career started to take off, but hers was going even better, so Roger turned down a promotion so he could spend more time at home with the children, and she could go on all her business trips. It was only going to be for a few years, but her career started to go even better while his was treading water, and the more difference there was between their salaries, the harder it was for them to swap places.

When the kids had grown up and Anna-Lena had accomplished all her goals, she turned to Roger and said 'Now it's your turn.' But he wasn't offered any more promotions. He'd got too old. They didn't have any way of talking about that, because they'd never practiced the right words.

So now she's trying to make it up to him by moving all the time and renovating apartments, all so they have… a project in common. Roger has no kids to look after anymore, so he feels worthless. And Anna-Lena just wants a home. You can say a lot of things about me, but don't you dare insinuate that I'm not rooting for those two.”

Zara lit another cigarette, mostly so she could keep her eyes busy staring at the glowing tip.

“Did Anna-Lena tell you all that?”

“You'd be surprised what people tell me.”

“No I wouldn't,” Zara whispered.

She felt like telling him that she needs distance. That she can't stop massaging her hands. That she counts everything in every room because it calms her down.

That she likes spreadsheets and turnover forecasts because she likes order. But she also felt like telling him that the economic system she has devoted her life to working in is the world's biggest problem right now, because we made the system too strong. We forgot how greedy we are, but above all we forgot how weak we are. And now it's crushing us.

She felt like saying all this, but by this point in her life she had gotten used to the fact that people either didn't understand or didn't want to understand. So she stood there in silence. And, deep down, wished she'd stayed silent the whole time.

They each smoked another cigarette. Zara objected to his presence less than she would have expected, and that day had already offered more new experiences than she felt ready to absorb, so her fingers immediately started to trace the edges of the headphones when the rabbit's ears wavered in her direction again. She could tell that he was trying to think of something to ask her, to keep the conversation going.

That was what annoyed Zara most about men. Because they could only ever come up with two questions: “What line of work are you in?” and “Are you married?”

But this peculiar Lennart plucked up the courage to ask instead: “What are you listening to?”

Bloody hell, Zara thought. Why can't you just feel the cold and not be interested in me? She opened her mouth, there was so much she wanted to say, but all that came out was: "The bank robber's going to give up soon. The police will come storming in any time now. You should go and put a pair of pants on."

The rabbit nodded disappointedly. He left her with her headphones on, music at top volume, counting the windows over and over again. It may not be the sort of love story anyone would write poetry about. But they floored each other there and then.

[stelle knocked tentatively on the door to the closet. Julia opened it.

“I just wanted to let you know that the pizzas are on their way, but I was thinking that you must be starving, eating for two, you poor thing. Would you like something to eat while we're waiting? There's food in the freezer. I mean, people almost always have food in the freezer,” Estelle offered.

“No, thanks, that's sweet of you but I'm fine,” Julia smiled. She liked the fact that Estelle was concerned, more people should do that, ask if you're hungry instead of how you're feeling.

"Well, then, I won't disturb you," Estelle said, and started to close the door.

“Would you like to come in?” Julia asked, but to be honest she said it the way you do when you kind of hope the answer's going to be no.

“I'd love to!” Estelle chirruped, then stepped in and closed the door behind her. She pushed past the stepladder and sat down on the last available seat in the closet: a chest, tucked right at the back. She folded her hands on her lap, smiled warmly, and said: “Well, this is all rather nice, really, isn't it? I haven't eaten pizza for years.

Of course I'd have to admit that this whole business of the bank robbery and hostage taking hasn't been particularly pleasant for any of us, but I can't help thinking that it's quite encouraging that we've got a female bank robber. Don't you think? It's good when us girls show what we're capable of!”

Julia put her thumb on a specific point right between her eyes, pressed hard, and managed to control herself enough to reply: “Hmm. Threatening us with a pistol, but still... Girl power!”

“I don't think it's a real pistol!” Anna-Lena interjected quickly.

Julia closed her eyes so no one would see she was rolling them. Estelle smiled quizzically and asked: "Well, I didn't mean to come in and interrupt you like this, like some silly old thing. What were you talking about?"

“Marriage,” Anna-Lena sniffed.

“Oh!” Estelle exclaimed, as if her favorite category had just popped up on a television quiz show.

Her enthusiasm softened Julia's attitude slightly, so she asked her: "Did you say your husband's name is Knut? How long have you been married?"

Estelle counted in her head until she ran out of numbers. “Knut and I have been married forever. It's like that when you get old. In the end there simply wasn't ever a time before him.”

Julia had to admit that she liked that answer.

“How do you manage to have such a long marriage?” she asked.

“You fight for it,” Estelle replied honestly.

Julia didn't seem to like that quite as much.

“That doesn't sound very romantic.”

Estelle grinned knowingly.

“You have to listen to each other all the time. But not all the time. If you listen to each other all the time, there's a risk that you can't forgive each other afterward.”

Julia ran her fingernails unhappily across her eyebrows.

“Ro and I used to get along fine. We got along so well that it didn't matter that we were good at falling out, too. Sometimes I used to fall out with her on purpose, because we were so good at... the other bit.

But now, oh, I don't know. I'm just not quite so sure about us anymore.”

Estelle toyed with her wedding ring and moistened her lips thoughtfully.

“When we first fell in love, Knut and I reached an agreement about how we were allowed to argue, because Knut said that sooner or later the first flush of infatuation wears off and you end up arguing whether you like it or not. So we came to an agreement, like the Geneva Convention, where the rules of war were agreed. Knut and I promised that no matter how angry we got, we weren't allowed to consciously say things just to hurt each other. We weren't allowed to argue just for the sake of winning. Because, sooner or later, that would end up with one of us winning. And no marriage can survive that.”

“Did it work?” Julia asked.

“I don't know,” Estelle admitted.

“No?”

“We never got past the first flush of infatuation.”

There was no point even trying not to like her just then. Estelle looked around the closet for a while, as if she were trying to remember something, then she stood up and lifted the lid of the chest.

“What are you doing?” Julia wondered.

“Just having a look,” Estelle said apologetically.

Anna-Lena found this upsetting, because Anna-Lena thought there were actually unwritten rules about how much snooping you were allowed to do at apartment viewings.

“You can't do that! You're only allowed to look in cupboards if they're already open! Except for kitchen cupboards. You're allowed to open kitchen cupboards, but only for a few seconds, to see how big they are, but you're not allowed to touch the contents or make any judgments about their lifestyle.

There are... there are rules! You're allowed to open the dishwasher, but not the washing machine!”

“You might have been to a few toooo many apartment viewings...,” Julia said to her.

“I know,” Anna-Lena sighed.

“There's wine in here!” Estelle exclaimed happily, pulling two bottles out of the chest. “And a corkscrew!”

“Wine?” Anna-Lena repeated, suddenly delighted, so it was evidently okay to snoop inside chests if you found wine.

“Would you like some?” Estelle offered.

“I'm pregnant,” Julia pointed out.

“Aren't you allowed to drink wine, then?”

“You're not allowed to drink any alcohol at all.”

“But... wine?”

Estelle's eyes were wide with benevolent intent. Because wine is only grapes, after all. And children like grapes.

“Wine, too,” Julia said patiently, and thought of how Ro had said “All the time! I'm drinking for three now!” when the midwife at the antenatal clinic asked a routine question about how much they drank. The midwife didn't realize Ro was joking, and the atmosphere became tense. Julia laughed as she thought about it now. That happens quite a lot when you're married to an idiot.

“Have I done something wrong?” Estelle wondered anxiously, drinking straight from the bottle before passing it to Anna-Lena, who didn't hesitate before taking two long swigs, which seemed highly out of character for Anna-Lena. It was a strange day for all of them.

“No, not at all, I was just thinking about something my wife did,” Julia smiled, and tried to stop laughing, with mixed results.

“Julia's wife is an idiot! Just like Roger!” Anna-Lena explained helpfully to Estelle, and drank another swig, this time larger than the space in her mouth, which prompted a fit of coughing through her nose. Julia leaned forward and patted Anna-Lena on the back. Estelle helpfully took the bottle from her and made it a bit lighter in the meantime.

Then she said quietly: “Knut isn't an idiot. He really isn't. But it's taking him an awfully long time to park the car. I wish he was here, so I... well, I just wasn't prepared to be held hostage on my own.”

Julia smiled.

“You're not on your own, you've got us. And this bank robber doesn't seem to want to hurt anyone, so I'm sure everything's going to be all right. But... can I ask you something?”

"Of course you can, sweetheart."

“Did you know there was going to be wine in that chest? If you didn't, why did you decide to have a look?”

Estelle blushed. After a long pause, she confessed: “I usually hide wine in the closet at home. Knut used to think that was silly. I mean, he thinks it's silly. But you assume people think the way you do yourself, so I was thinking that if the person living here was worried about people coming and seeing bottles of wine and thinking 'Well, this person's an alcoholic,' then the closet would be the perfect place to hide the wine.”

Anna-Lena took another two gulps of wine, hiccupped loudly, and added: "Alcoholics don't have unopened bottles of wine in the house. They have empty wine bottles."

Estelle nodded at her gratefully, and replied without thinking: “That's kind of you to say. Knut would have agreed with you.”

The old woman's eyes were glistening, not only from the wine. Julia frowned so hard and so thoughtfully that she got a whole new hairstyle. She leaned forward, put her hand gently on Estelle's arm, and whispered: “Estelle? Knut isn't parking the car, is he?”

Estelle's thin lips disappeared sadly beneath each other, so the word barely reached past them when she eventually admitted:

Witness Interview

Date: December 30

Name of witness: Lennart

Jack: Let me see if I've got this right: you weren't at the viewing as a prospective buyer, but had been hired by Anna-Lena to spoil it?

Lenart: Exactly. No Boundaries Lennart, that's me. Would you like a business card? I do stag parties, too—if the guy getting married has stolen your girl, that sort of thing.

Jack: So that's your job? To ruin apartment viewings?

Lenart: No, I'm an actor. There just aren't many roles around at the moment. But I was in The Merchant from Venice at the local theater.

Jack: Of Venice.

Lenart: No, at the local theater here!

Jack: I meant that it's called The Merchant of Venice. Not from Venice. Never mind. Can you tell me anything else about the bank robber?

Lenart: I don't think so. I've told you everything I remember.

Jack: Okay. Well, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to stay a little longer, in case we have any further questions.

Lenart: No problem!

Jack: Oh, yes, one last thing: What do you know about the fireworks?

Lenart: How do you mean?

Jack: The fireworks the perpetrator asked for.

Lenart: What about them?

Jack: Well, when someone takes other people hostage, it isn't customary for the perpetrator to demand fireworks before letting them go. It's more normal to demand money.

Lenart: With all due respect, it's more normal not to take anyone hostage in the first place.

Jack: That's as may be, but don't you think fireworks is an odd demand? That was the last thing the perpetrator did before you were released.

Lenart: I don't know. It's New Year. And everyone likes fireworks, don't they?

Jack: Dog owners don't.

Lenart: Ah.

Jack: What do you mean by that?

Lenart: I was just surprised. I thought all police officers liked dogs.

Jack: I didn't say I didn't like dogs!

Lenart: Most people would have said that dogs don't like fireworks. But you said dog owners.

Jack: I'm not particularly fond of animals.

Lenart: Sorry. A peril of the profession. You learn to read people in my job.

Jack: As an actor?

Lenart: No, the other. Are the others still here at the station, by the way?

Jack: Who?

Lenart: You know, the others who were in the apartment.

Jack: Are you thinking of anyone in particular?

Lenart: Zara. For instance.

Jack: For instance?

Lenart: There's no need to look like I asked something improper.

I mean, I'm only asking.

Jack: Yes. Zara's still here. Why do you ask?

Lenart: Oh, just wondered. You get curious about people sometimes, that's all, and she's the first person in a long time who I haven't been able to read at all. I tried, but I didn't get her at all. Why are you laughing?

Jack: I'm not laughing.

Lenart: Yes you are!

Jack: Sorry, I didn't mean to. Something my dad says, that's all.

Lenart: What?

Jack: He says you end up marrying the one you don't understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.

"Death, death, death," Estelle thought in the closet. Many years ago she had read that her favorite author used to start telephone conversations with that.

"Death, death, death." Then, when that was out of the way, they could discuss other things. Otherwise, after a certain age, no phone call ever seemed to be about life, only the other.

Estelle could understand that point of view these days. The same author once wrote that "you have to live your life in such a way that you become friends with death," but Estelle found that harder. She remembered when she used to read bedtime stories to the children, and Peter Pan declaring: "To die will be an awfully big adventure."

Maybe for the person doing it, Estelle thought, but not for the one who was left behind. All that awaited her were a thousand sunrises where life is a beautiful prison. Her cheeks quivered, reminding her that she had grown old, her skin was so thin now that it moved the whole time in a breeze that nobody else could feel.

She had nothing against old age, just loneliness. When she met Knut it wasn't a love story, not the way she had read it could feel, theirs was always more like a story of a child finding the perfect playmate. When Knut touched Estelle, right up to the end, it made her feel like climbing trees and jumping from jetties.

Most of all she missed making him laugh so hard he spat his breakfast out. That sort of thing only got more fun with age, especially after he got false teeth.

“Knut's dead,” she said for the first time, and swallowed hard.

Julia was looking down at the floor in irresolute silence. Anna-Lena sat and tried to think of something to say for a while, then leaned toward Estelle and tapped her on the shoulder with the wine bottle instead. Estelle took it and drank two small sips, before handing it back and going on, half to herself: "But he was very good at parking, Knut. He could parallel park in tiny spaces. So sometimes, when it's most painful, when I see something really funny and think 'He'd have laughed so hard his breakfast would have covered the wallpaper'—that's when I fantasize that he's just outside, parking the car. He wasn't perfect, no man is, God knows, but whenever we went anywhere and it was raining, he would always drop me off just outside the door. So I could wait in the warm while he... parked the car."

A silence forced its way between the three women, and gradually emptied their vocabularies until none of them knew what to say at all. Death, death, death, Estelle thought.

When Knut was lying in his sickbed those last nights, she asked him: “Are you scared?” He replied: “Yes.” Then his fingers ran through her hair and he added: “But it'll be quite nice to get a bit of peace and quiet. You can put that on the headstone.” Estelle laughed hard at that. When he left her she wept so hard that she couldn't breathe. Her body was never really the same after that, she curled up and never quite unfurled again.

“He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now,” she said to the other women in the closet.

Anna-Lena sat for a while before she opened her mouth, because, although she was starting to get drunk, she understood that it wouldn't be good form in the circumstances to appear greedy. They were wasted seconds, of course, because when she spoke the thought out loud, neither good intentions nor wild horses could hide the hopefulness in her voice.

“So... if your husband isn't parking the car, can I ask if it was true that you're looking at this apartment on behalf of your daughter, or was that...”

“No, no, my daughter lives in a nice row house with her husband and children,” Estelle replied sheepishly.

Just outside Stockholm, in fact, but Estelle didn't say that, because she didn't think this conversation needed to get any more complicated.

“So you're just here... looking?” Anna-Lena asked.

“Seriously, Anna-Lena, she's not competing with you and Roger to buy the apartment! Stop being so insensitive!” Julia snapped.

Anna-Lena stared down into the bottle and mumbled: “I was only asking.”

Estelle patted them both gratefully on the arm, one at a time, and whispered: "Now don't fall out on my account, dears. I'm too old to be worth that."

Julia nodded sullenly and put her hand around her stomach. Anna-Lena did the same with the wine bottle.

“How old are your grandchildren?” she asked.

“They're teenagers now,” Estelle said.

"Oh, sorry to hear that," Anna-Lena said with feeling.

Estelle smiled feebly. If you've lived with teenagers, you know they only exist for themselves, and their parents have their hands full dealing with the various horrors of life. Both the teenagers' and their own. There was no place for Estelle there, she was mostly something of a nuisance. They were pleased that she answered the phone when they called on her birthday, but the rest of the time they assumed time stood still for her. She was a nice ornament that they only took out at Christmas and Midsummer.

“No... I'm not here to buy the apartment. I just haven't got anything to do. Sometimes I go to apartment viewings out of curiosity, to listen to people talking, hear what they're dreaming about. People's dreams are always at their grandest when they're looking for somewhere to live. Knut died slowly, you know.

He lay in a care home for years, I couldn't start living as if he was dead, but he... he wasn't alive. Not really. So my life was on pause, somehow. I took the bus to the care home each day and sat with him.

Read books. Out loud at first, then to myself at the end. That's how it goes. But it was something to do. And a person needs that.”

Anna-Lena thought that yes, that was how it was, people needed to have a project.

“Life goes so fast. Working life, anyway,” she thought out loud, and looked very taken aback when she realized that Julia had heard her.

“What did you used to do?” the young woman asked.

Anna-Lena filled her lungs, simultaneously hesitant and proud.

“I was an analyst for an industrial company. Well, I suppose I was the senior analyst, really, but I did my best not to be.”

“Senior analyst?” Julia repeated, instantly ashamed of how that sounded.

Anna-Lena saw the surprise in her eyes, but she was used to it and didn't take offense. Ordinarily she would just have changed the subject, but perhaps the wine had the upper hand on this occasion, because instead she thought out loud, without any hesitation: "Yes, I was. Not that I wanted that. To be a boss, I mean. The president of the company said that was precisely why he wanted me to do it. He said you don't have to lead by telling other people what to do, you can lead by just letting them do what they're capable of instead. So I tried to be a teacher more than a boss. I know people find it hard to believe of me, but I'm not a bad teacher.

When I retired, two of my staff said they hadn't realized I was actually their boss until they heard the speech thanking me for my work. A lot of people would probably have taken that as an insult, but I thought it was... nice. If you can do something for someone in such a way that they think they managed it all on their own, then you've done a good job."

Julia smiled.

“You're full of surprises, Anna-Lena.”

Anna-Lena looked like that was the nicest compliment anyone had ever given her. Then sorrow and grief swept through her eyes again, she closed them quickly and opened them slowly.

“Everyone thinks I've… well, when you meet us, people probably think I've always been in Roger's shadow. That really isn't the case. Roger should have had a chance to fulfill his potential. He had great potential.

But my job… things were going so well for me, better and better, so he turned down promotions so he could drop the kids off at nursery and all that. I got to travel and have my career, always thinking that it would be his turn next year. But that never happened.”

She fell silent. For once, Julia wasn't sure what to say. Estelle looked like she didn't know what to do with her hands, which resulted in her opening the chest and sticking them in there again. They came back out with a box of matches and a packet of cigarettes.

“Goodness,” she exclaimed brightly.

“What sort of person lives here, really?” Julia wondered.

“Would anyone like one?” Estelle offered.

“I don't smoke!” Anna-Lena declared immediately.

“Nor me. Or rather, I've given up. Most of the time. Do you smoke?” Estelle wondered, turning to Julia, then added quickly: “Well, I don't suppose anyone does when they're pregnant. In my day they used to. You used to cut back a bit, of course. But I'm assuming you don't smoke at all?”

“No, not at all,” Julia said patiently.

“Young people today. You're so aware of how you affect your children. I heard a pediatric doctor say on television that a generation ago, parents used to come to him and say 'Our child's wetting the bed, what's wrong with him?' Now, a generation later, they come to him and say 'Our child's wetting the bed, what's wrong with us?' You take the blame for everything.”

Julia leaned back against the wall.

“We probably make all the same mistakes that your generation did. Just different versions of them.”

Estelle rolled the packet between her hands.

“I used to smoke on our balcony, because Knut didn't like the smell when I smoked indoors, and I liked the view. We could see all the way to the bridge. Just like from this apartment, really.

I used to be very fond of that. But then... well... you might remember that a man jumped off that bridge ten years ago? It was in all the papers. And I... well, I checked to see what time of day he jumped, and realized it was right after I'd been out on the balcony smoking.

Knut called to say something was happening on television and I hurried back inside, leaving the cigarette to burn itself out in the ashtray, and in that time the man had climbed up onto the railing and jumped. I stopped smoking on the balcony after that.”

“Oh, Estelle, it wasn't your fault that someone jumped off a bridge,” Julia said, trying to console her.

“It wasn't the bridge's fault, either,” Anna-Lena added.

“What?”

“It isn't the bridge's fault if someone jumps off it. I remember it well, you know, because Roger found the whole thing very upsetting.”

“Did he know the man who jumped?” Estelle asked.

“Oh, no. But he knew a lot about the bridge. Roger was an engineer, you see, he built bridges. Not that particular bridge, but if you're as interested in bridges as Roger is, then you end up being interested in all bridges. They talked about that man on television as if it was the bridge's fault. Roger was very upset about that. Bridges exist to bring people closer together, he said.

Julia couldn't help thinking that was simultaneously a remarkably odd and a rather romantic thing to say. That was probably why—unless it was the fact that she was hungry and exhausted—she suddenly said: "My fiancée and I were in Australia a few years ago. She wanted to do a bungee jump off a bridge."

“Your fiancée? You mean Ro?” Estelle nodded.

“No, my previous fiancée.”

It was a long story. All stories are, when it comes down to it, if you tell them from the start. This story, for instance, would have been considerably shorter if it had just been about three women in a closet. But of course it's also about two police officers, and one of them was on his way up the stairs.

57

What had happened out in the street was that Jack, before he went into the building opposite, had told his dad to wait there. And definitely not to go anywhere. More specifically, not into the building where the hostage drama was taking place. Just wait here, the son said.

But of course the father didn't do that.

He took the pizzas and went up to the apartment, and when he came back down, he had spoken to the bank robber.

Inside the closet, obviously Julia regretted mentioning her former fiancée as soon as she said it, so she added: "I was engaged when I met Ro. But that's a long story. Forget I mentioned it."

“We've got plenty of time for long stories,” Estelle assured her, because she'd found another bottle of wine in the chest.

“Your fiancée wanted to jump off a bridge?” Anna-Lena repeated in alarm.

“Yes. A bungee jump. With a rubber rope tied around your feet.”

“That sounds mad.”

Julia's fingertips massaged her temples.

“I didn't like the idea, either. But she was always wanting to do things. Experience everything. It was on that trip that I realized I couldn't live with her, because I haven't got the energy to keep experiencing things the whole time. I started longing for everyday life, all the boring stuff, but she hated being bored. So I came back from Australia a week before her, blaming the fact that I had to work. And that was when I kissed Ro for the first time.”

Julia started to giggle as she said that. Partly out of shame, but possibly also because it was the first time in ages that she'd thought about how they fell in love. You tend to forget that when you're in the middle of the life that follows, when you're going to become a parent with someone, it suddenly feels impossible to remember that you ever loved anyone else.

“How did you meet? You and Ro?” Estelle asked, wine staining the corners of her mouth.

“The first time? She came into my shop. I'm a florist, and she wanted some tulips. That was several months before I went to Australia. I didn't think much about it, she was… attractive, of course, anyone can see that…”

Estelle nodded eagerly: “Yes, that was the first thing I thought! She really is extremely beautiful! And so exotic!”

Julia sighed. “Exotic? Because her hair's a different color to yours and mine?”

Estelle looked unhappy. "Aren't you allowed to say that anymore?"

Julia didn't know how to begin to explain that her wife wasn't a piece of fruit, so instead she took a deep breath and carried on: "Either way, she was attractive. Very attractive. Even more attractive than she is now. Not that... don't tell her that, whatever you do... she's still attractive! But I, well, I'd certainly have liked to, you know... with her.

But I was already taken. But she kept coming back to buy tulips. Several times a week, sometimes.

And she made me laugh, out loud, out of nowhere, and you don't meet many people like that. I happened to mention that to my mom, and she said: 'You can't live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime!'"

“Your mom's a wise woman,” Estelle said.

“Yes.”

“Is she retired?”

“Yes.”

“What did she used to do?”

“She cleaned offices.”

“What did your dad do?”

“He hit women.”

Estelle looked paralyzed, Anna-Lena appalled. Julia looked at the pair of them and thought about her mom, and how the most beautiful thing about her was the fact that she always stared life right in the eye, and no matter what it threw at her, refused to stop being a romantic. That takes the sort of heart that hardly anyone possesses.

“Poor dear child,” Estelle whispered.

“What a bastard,” Anna-Lena muttered.

Julia shrugged, the way children who grew up too soon do, shaking the feelings off.

“We walked out on him. He didn't come looking for us. I didn't even hate him, because Mom didn't let me. After everything he'd done to her, she wouldn't even let me hate him. I always wanted her to meet someone new, someone who was kind and made her laugh, but she always said I was enough... But then... when I told her about Ro, Mom saw something in me that made me see something in her. That probably sounds... I don't know how to explain it. Something she'd experienced once, and given up all hope of, if you get what I mean? And I thought... is this how it feels? That thing everyone talks about? The real thing?"

Anna-Lena wiped some wine from her chin.

“So what happened?”

Julia blinked, first quickly, then slowly.

“My fiancée was still in Australia. And Ro came into the shop. I'd spoken to Mom on the phone that morning, and she just laughed when I said I didn't know how Ro felt, or even if she felt anything at all. Mom just said: 'Listen, no one likes tulips that much, Jules!' I suppose I tried to deny it, but Mom said I was practically being unfaithful already because I was spending so much time thinking about her. She said Ro was my 'flower shop.' And I cried. So I was standing there in the shop and Ro came in, and I... well, I laughed so hard at something she said that I accidentally spat on her face.

She was laughing, too. So I guess she plucked up the courage, because I couldn't do it, and asked if I'd like to go for a drink with her. I said yes, but I was so nervous when we got there that I got really drunk.

I went outside to smoke, got into a row with a security guard, and wasn't let back in. So I pointed through the window at Ro, who was standing at the bar, and said she was my girlfriend. The guard went in and told her that, and then she came out, and then she was. I called my fiancée and broke off the engagement. She's probably been having loads of fun ever since.

And I... damn, I love being boring with Ro. Does that sound mad? I love arguing with her about sofas and pets. She's my everyday. The whole... world.”

“I like the everyday,” Anna-Lena admitted.

“Your mom was right, the ones who make you laugh last a lifetime,” Estelle repeated, thinking of a British author who had written that nothing in the world is so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor. Then she thought about an American author who had written that loneliness is like starvation, you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

Julia was thinking about how her mom, when she told her she was pregnant, looked first at Julia's stomach, then at Ro's, then asked: "How did you decide which of you was going to... get knocked up?" Julia got annoyed, of course, and replied sarcastically: "We played rock-paper-scissors, Mom!" Her mom looked at them both again with deadly seriousness and asked: "So who won?"

That still made Julia laugh. She said to the women in the closet: “Ro's going to be a brilliant mom. She can make any child laugh, just like my mom, because their sense of humor hasn't developed at all since they were nine.”

“You're going to be a brilliant mom, too,” Estelle assured her.

The bags under Julia's eyes moved softly as she blinked.

“I don't know. Everything feels such a big deal, and other parents all seem so… funny the whole time. They laugh and joke and everyone says you should play with children, and I don't like playing, I didn't like it even when I was a child. So I'm worried the child's going to be disappointed. Everyone said it would be different when I got pregnant, but I don't actually like all children. I thought that would change, but I meet my friends' children now and I still think they're annoying and have a lousy sense of humor.”

Anna-Lena spoke up, briefly and to the point:

“You don't have to like all children. Just one. And children don't need the world's best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”

“Thanks for saying that,” Julia replied honestly. “I'm just worried my child isn't going to be happy. That it's going to inherit all my anxiety and uncertainty.”

Estelle gently patted Julia's hair.

“Your child's going to be absolutely fine, you'll see. And absolutely fine can cover any number of peculiarities.”

“That's encouraging,” Julia smiled.

Estelle went on patting her hair softly.

“Are you going to do all you can, Julia? Are you going to protect the child with your life? Are you going to sing to it and read it stories and promise that everything will feel better tomorrow?”

“Are you going to raise it so that it doesn't grow up to be one of those idiots who don't take their backpack off when they're on public transport?”

“I'll do what I can,” Julia promised.

Estelle was thinking about another author now, one who almost a hundred years ago wrote that your children aren't your children, they're the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.

“You're going to be fine. You don't have to love being a mother, not all the time.”

Anna-Lena interjected: “I didn't like the poo, I really didn't. At first it was okay, but when children are around a year old they're like Labradors. Fully grown ones, I mean, not puppies, but—”

“Okay,” Julia nodded, to get her to stop.

“There's something about the consistency at a certain age, it gets like glue, sticks under your fingernails, and if you rub your face on the way to work...”

“Thanks! That's enough!” Julia assured her, but Anna-Lena couldn't stop herself.

“The worst thing is when they bring friends home, and suddenly there's a five-year-old stranger sitting on your toilet demanding to be cleaned up. I mean, you can put up with your own kids' poo, but other people's…”

“Thanks!” Julia said emphatically.

Anna-Lena pursued her lips. Estelle giggled.

“You're going to be a good mom. And you're a good wife,” Estelle added, even though Julia hadn't even mentioned that last anxiety. Julia was holding the palms of her hands around her stomach, and stared down at her fingernails.

“Do you think? Sometimes it feels like all I ever do is nag Ro. Even though I love her.”

Estelle smiled.

“She knows. Believe me. Does she still make you laugh?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

“Then she knows.”

“You have no idea, I mean, wow, she makes me laugh all the time. The first time Ro and I were about to... you know..., ” Julia smiled, but stopped when she couldn't think of a word for what she was sure neither of the two older women would actually be horrified to hear.

“What?” Anna-Lena wondered, uncomprehendingly.

Estelle nudged her in the side and winked.

“You know. The first time they were going to go to Stockholm.”

“Ob!” Anna-Lena exclaimed, and blushed from her head to her feet.

But Julia didn't quite seem to hear. Her eyes lost their footing; there was a joke there somewhere in her memory, one Ro had made in the taxi that first time that Julia had intended to talk about. But instead she found herself stumbling over the words.

“I... it's so silly, I'd forgotten this. I'd done some laundry, and there were some white sheets hanging over the bedroom door to dry. And when Ro opened the door and they hit her in the face, she started. She tried not to let it show, but I felt her flinch, so I asked what the matter was, and at first she didn't want to say. Because she didn't want to burden me with anything, not as early as that, she was worried I'd break up with her before we'd even got together.

But I kept on nagging, of course, because I'm good at nagging, and in the end we sat up all night and Ro told me about how her family got to Sweden. They fled across the mountains, in the middle of winter, and the children each had to carry a sheet, and if they heard the sound of helicopters they were supposed to lie down in the snow with the sheet over them, so they couldn't be seen. And their parents would run in different directions, so that if the men in the helicopter started firing, they'd fire at the moving targets. And not at... and I didn't know what to...”

She cracked, like thin ice on a puddle of water, first just some hairline wrinkles around her eyes, then the rest, all at once. The collar of her top turned a darker color. She was thinking about everything Ro had told her that night, the incomprehensible cruelties that terrible people are capable of inflicting on each other, and the utter insanity of war. Then she thought of how Ro, after all that, had somehow managed to grow up to be the sort of person who made other people laugh. Because her parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that humor is the soul's last line of defense, and as long as we're laughing we're alive, so bad puns and fart jokes were their way of expressing their defiance against despair. Ro told Julia all this that first night, and after that Julia got to spend all of the world's everyday's with her.

Something like that can make you put up with living with birds.

“An affair that started in a flower shop,” Estelle nodded slowly. “I like that.” She sat silent for several minutes. Then it burst out of her: “I had an affair once! Knut never knew.”

“Dear Lord!” Anna-Lena exclaimed, now sensing that this was starting to get out of hand after all.

“Yes, it wasn't all that long ago, you know,” Estelle grinned.

“Who was it?” Julia asked.

“A neighbor in our building. He read a lot, like me. Knut never read. He used to say authors were like musicians who never get to the point.

But this other man, the neighbor, he always had a book tucked under his arm when we met in the elevator. So did I. One day he offered me his book, saying: 'I've finished this one, I think you should read it.' And so we started to swap books. He read such wonderful things.

I don't have the words to describe it, but it was like going on a journey with someone. Where didn't matter. To outer space.

It went on for a long time. I started to fold down the corners of pages when there was a bit I really liked, and he started to write little comments in the margins. Just the odd word. 'Beautiful.' 'True.' That's the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people's.

One summer I opened a book and sand trickled out of it, and I knew he'd liked it so much he hadn't been able to put it down. Every now and then I would get a book where some of the pages were crumpled, and I knew he'd been crying. One day I told him that, in the elevator, and he replied that I was the only person who knew that about him.”

“And that was when you...,” Julia nodded with a naughty smile.

“Oh, no, no, no...,” Estelle squeaked, and looked like she might have liked to finish the sentence by saying that she might possibly have wished it had happened, but of course that didn't change anything. “We were never, it never, I could never...”

“Why not?” Julia asked.

Estelle smiled, proud and full of longing at the same time. It takes a certain age for that, a certain life.

“Because you dance with the person you went to the party with. And I went with Knut.”

“So... what happened?” Anna-Lena wondered.

Estelle's breathing didn't show any sign of speeding up, she didn't have many big secrets left. After this one, possibly none at all.

“One day in the elevator he gave me a book, and inside it was a key to his apartment. He said he didn't have any family living nearby, and that he wanted someone in the building to have a spare key 'in case anything happened.' I didn't say anything, and I didn't do anything, but I got the sense that maybe... maybe he would have liked it. If something had happened.”

She smiled. So did Julia.

“So in all that time, you never...?”

“No, no, no. We exchanged books. Until he died a few years later. Something to do with his heart.

His siblings put the apartment up for sale, but his furniture was still there at the viewing. So I went along, pretending to be interested in buying it. I walked around in his home, ran my hands over his kitchen counter, the hangers in his closet. In the end I found myself standing in front of his bookcase.

It's such an odd thing, the way you can know someone so perfectly through what they read. We liked the same voices, in the same way. So I let myself have a few minutes to think about what we could have been for each other, if everything had been different, somewhere else in our lives.”

“And then?” Julia whispered.

Estelle smiled. Defiantly. Happily.

“Then I went home. But I kept the key to his apartment. I never told Knut. It was my affair.”

Silence settled in the closet for a while. In the end Anna-Lena plucked up the courage to say: “I've never had an affair. But once I changed hairdressers, and I didn't dare walk past the old one for several years.”

It wasn't the strongest anecdote, but she wanted to feel that she was participating. She had never had time for an affair, how on earth does anyone find the time? All that stress, Anna-Lena thought, and a whole new man to deal with.

She had spent her life working and rushing home, working and rushing home, and always felt guilty for not being good enough in either place. In those circumstances it's easy to feel sympathy for other people who aren't quite good enough. That's probably why, out of all the people in the apartment who had already had the thought, it was Anna-Lena who was the first to say out loud: “I think we should try to help the bank robber.”

Julia looked up, and their eyes met with a whole new sense of respect.

“Yes, so do I! I was just thinking that. I don't think any of this was the intention,” Julia nodded.

“I just don't know how we could go about helping her,” Anna-Lena admitted.

“No, the police must have the building surrounded, so I don't think there's any way she can escape, sadly,” Julia sighed.

Estelle drank more wine. She turned the packet of cigarettes over in her hand, because of course you're not allowed to smoke in front of pregnant women, you really aren't, at least not until you're so drunk that you can claim with a clear conscience that you were too drunk to notice that there was one nearby.

“Maybe she could just wear a disguise?” she suddenly said, with just a hint of a slur on the s in “disguise.”

Julia shook her head uncomprehendingly.

“What? Who could wear a disguise?”

"The bank robber," Estelle said, taking another swig.

“What sort of disguise?”

Estelle shrugged.

“The real estate agent.”

“The real estate agent?”

“Have you seen any sign of a real estate agent in this apartment since the bank robber arrived?”

“No... no, now that you come to mention it...”

Estelle drank more wine, then nodded again.

“I'm fairly certain that all the police outside will take it for granted that there's a real estate agent present at an apartment viewing. So if...”

Julia stared at her. Then started to laugh.

“So if the bank robber pretends to give herself up and let all the hostages go, she can pretend to be the real estate agent and walk out with the rest of us! Estelle, you're a genius!”

“Thanks,” Estelle said, and peered down into the bottle with one eye closed to see how much was left before she could start smoking.

Julia struggled to her feet as quickly as she could and hurried over to the door to call to Ro and explain the new plan, but just as she was about to open the door there was a knock on it. Not hard, but hard enough to make the three women jump as if a load of puppies and sparklers had been thrown into the closet. Julia opened the door a crack. The rabbit was standing outside looking awkward, insofar as it was possible to tell.

"Sorry, I don't want to disturb you. But I've been told to put some pants on."

“Your pants are in here?” Julia wondered.

The rabbit scratched his neck.

“No, I had them in the bathroom, before the viewing started. But I washed my hands and managed to splash water on them, then I saw the scented candles on the washbasin, and thought I might be able to dry my pants by warming them up. And then... well... I managed to set my pants on fire. So then I had to pour even more water over them to put the flames out.

So my pants ended up soaking wet. And then the viewing started and I heard you all out in the apartment, and then the bank robber started shouting, and there wasn't really time... well, to cut a long story short, my pants are still wet. So I was thinking...”

The rabbit's head swayed in the direction of the suits hanging in the closet, which he was hoping he might be able to borrow instead. His ears accidentally hit Julia's forehead and she backed away, but the rabbit evidently interpreted this as an invitation to step inside.

“Yes, well, come in, why don't you...,” Julia grunted.

The rabbit looked around with interest.

“Isn't this lovely!” he said.

Anna-Lena disappeared beneath the suits and wiped her eyes. Estelle lit a cigarette, because she didn't think it mattered anymore, and when Anna-Lena aimed a disapproving glance in her direction Estelle said defensively: "Oh, it'll blow out through the air vent!"

The rabbit tilted his head slightly, then he asked: “What air vent?”

Estelle coughed, it was unclear if that was because of the cigarette or the question: “I mean... there seems to be some sort of ventilation in here, but it was only a guess. There's a breeze from up in the ceiling, though!”

“What are you talking about?” Julia asked.

Estelle coughed again. Then she stopped coughing. But there was still someone coughing, up in the ceiling.

They stared at each other, the rabbit and the three women, a diverse group of individuals, to put it mildly, huddled inside a closet at an apartment viewing that had been disrupted by the arrival of a bank robber. Stranger things had probably happened to people in the town, but not much stranger. Estelle had time to think that if Knut had opened the closet door just then he would have laughed out loud, there would have been breakfast everywhere, and she would have loved that.

The coughing up in the ceiling continued, like when you try to stifle it and it just gets worse. A cinema cough.

Julia dragged the stepladder to the back of the closet, Estelle got off the chest, Anna-Lena helped the rabbit up. He pressed his hands against the ceiling until it gave way. There was a hatch, and above it a very cramped little space.

And there sat the real estate agent.

In the police station Jack has nearly lost his voice with rage by this point.

“Tell the truth! Why did you ask for fireworks? Where's the real real estate agent? Is there even a real real estate agent?”

The real estate agent, whose jacket is still as crumpled as a bulldog's nose after the hours she had spent in the cramped space above the closet, tries and tries to explain everything. But if there's one thing modern life and the Internet have taught us, it's that you should never expect to win a discussion simply because you're right. The real estate agent can't prove she isn't the bank robber, because the only way she can do that is to say where the bank robber is right now, and the Realtor genuinely has no idea about that. Jack in turn refuses to believe that the real estate agent is a real estate agent, because if she was, that would mean he's missed something very obvious, and that in turn would mean that he isn't particularly smart after all, and he simply isn't ready for that.

Jim, who has been sitting silently throughout most of the interview, if you can actually call it an interview when it's really only consisted of Jack screaming nonstop, puts his hand on his son's shoulder and says: "Shall we take a break, son?"

Jack fixes his eyes on him: “You were fooled, Dad, don't you get that? You went up with those pizzas and you let her fool you!”

Hurt by this, Jim's shoulders slump as he finds himself declared an idiot.

“Can't we just take a break? Just a short one? A cup of coffee... a glass of water...?”

“Not until I've figured out what really happened!” Jack snarls.

He won't succeed.

What actually happened was that when Jack ended the call with the negotiator and ran out of the building on the other side of the street, Jim was just emerging from the building where the hostage drama was taking place. Jack of course was furious that Jim had gone into the building despite being told to stay outside, but Jim did his best to calm him down.

“Take it easy, now, son. Take it easy. That wasn't a bomb in the stairwell, just a box of Christmas lights.”

“I know! Why did you go into the building before I came back?”

“Because I knew you'd never let me go if I waited that long. I've spoken to the bank robber.”

“Of course I wouldn't have... hang on, what?”

“I said I've spoken to the bank robber.”

Then Jim told him exactly what had happened. Or rather, as exactly as he could. Because it has to be said that telling stories wasn't one of Jim's greatest talents in life. His wife always said he was the sort of person who tells a joke by starting with the punch line and then stopping, yelping, “No, hang on, something happened before that, darling, what was it that happened before the funny bit?” then trying to start from the beginning again, only to get it wrong again. He never remembers the end of films, so he can watch them any number of times and still be surprised when he finds out who the murderer is. He's not much good at party games or television quiz shows, either: there's one his son and wife both liked, with celebrities in trains who had to guess where they were going by solving various clues, and Jim's wife used to mimic him as he sat there on the sofa frantically suggesting everything from Spanish capitals to African republics to tiny Norwegian fishing villages, all in the same round. “See! I was right!” he always declared at the end, and Jack always snapped: “You're not right if you guess everything!” And his wife? She just laughed. Jim missed that so much. With him or at him, he didn't care, as long as she laughed.

So Jim took the opportunity to go into the building when Jack wasn't looking, because Jim knew that's what she would have done. He felt very, very foolish when he reached the landing with the box and realized that sometimes Christmas lights were just Christmas lights. But she would have laughed at that. So he kept going.

There were two apartments on the top floor. The hostage drama was taking place in the one on the right, and the one on the left was owned by the young couple who couldn't agree about coriander or juicers, and who Jim had had to phone not long before (and the details of whose separation he now knew more about than any normal person ought to know). Just to be on the safe side, he peered through the mailslot, but there were no lights on, and the mail on the mat suggested that no one had been there for a while. Only then did Jim ring the doorbell of the apartment containing the bank robber and hostages.

There was no answer for a long time, even though he kept ringing the bell. Eventually he realized that the bell wasn't working, and knocked instead. He had to do that several times as well, but eventually the door opened a crack and a man dressed in a suit and ski mask looked out. First at the pizzas, then at Jim.

“I haven't got any cash,” the man in the mask said.

“Don't worry,” Jim said, holding the pizzas out.

The man in the mask squinted suspiciously.

“Are you a cop?”

“Yes you are.”

Jim noted that the man's accent changed several times, as if he couldn't quite make his mind up. And it wasn't possible to determine much about his appearance, not even if he was tall or short, because he never opened the door properly.

“What makes you think I'm a police officer?” Jim asked innocently.

“Because pizza delivery guys don't give pizzas away for free.”

Jim couldn't really see much point in trying to deny it, so he said: "You're right, I'm a cop. But I'm on my own, and I'm unarmed. Is anyone in there hurt?"

“No. At least no more than they were when they arrived,” the bank robber said.

Jim nodded amiably.

“My colleagues out in the street are starting to get nervous, you see, because you haven't made any demands.”

Taken aback, the man in the ski mask blinked.

“I asked for pizza.”

“I mean... demands in order to release the hostages. We just don't want anyone to get hurt.”

The man in the ski mask took the pizza boxes, held up a finger, and said: "Give me a moment!"

He closed the door and disappeared into the apartment. One minute passed, then another, and just when Jim was thinking about knocking on the door again, it opened a couple of inches. The man looked out and said: “Fireworks.”

“I don't follow,” Jim said.

“I want fireworks, the sort I can see from the balcony. Then I'll let the hostages go.”

“Seriously?”

“And no cheap rubbish, either, don't try to trick me! Proper fireworks! All different colors, the sort that look like rain, the whole lot.”

“And then you'll release the hostages?”

“Then I'll release the hostages.”

“That's your only demand?”

“Yep.”

So Jim went back down the stairs, out to Jack in the street, and told him all this.

But it's worth pointing out again that Jim really isn't good at telling stories. He's completely hopeless, in fact. So he may not have remembered everything entirely accurately.

Roger was right that time when he looked at the plans and said that the top floor of the building had probably once been one single, large apartment. Then, when the elevator was installed, the apartment was split in two and sold as two separate apartments, which led to a number of creative solutions, among them the double wall in the living room and the abandoned ventilation duct above the closet. That was left intact, ignored for years, until, like people you think have become superfluous with age, it suddenly made itself known again.

Because in winter cold air would blow in from the attic of the old building: the insulation up there is poor and the air finds its way down in the form of a draft in the closet. You have to sit right at the back, on a chest full of wine, to notice it. Not a bad place to smoke, of course, if you're that way inclined, but apart from that the vent hasn't served any purpose at all for many years. Not until a real estate agent realized that the space was just large enough for a fairly small real estate agent to climb up and hide so she didn't get shot by an armed bank robber.

The opening in the ceiling was so tight that she had only just managed to squeeze through, which of course meant it was far too tight for Lennart not to get stuck, so much so that when he tried to pull himself free, the rabbit's head finally came loose. He fell backward from the hatch, off the stepladder, and landed heavily on the floor. Horrified, the real estate agent leaned past the rabbit's head and out of the hatch to see if he'd killed himself, whereupon she, too, promptly lost her balance and tumbled through the hole, landing on top of him. Anna-Lena's foot was trapped beneath them and she fell over, too. The stepladder wobbled and in turn fell over, hitting the hatch on the way and swinging it shut with a bang. The rabbit's head remained up there.

Roger, Ro, and the bank robber heard the commotion from out in the apartment and came rushing over to see what was going on. Everyone inside the closet tried to crawl out, and everyone outside tried to figure out which limbs to pull on, not altogether unlike trying to untangle the wiring of the Christmas lights the Christmas after the Christmas when you had a row with your wife about brothels and ended up stuffing the whole lot into the box, thinking: “I'll sort the whole darn mess out next Christmas!”

When they were all finally back on their feet, they stared in unison at Lennart's underpants, because it had become difficult not to, even if Lennart himself had no idea what was going on until Anna-Lena howled: "You're bleeding!"

Lennart, now free of the rabbit's head, leaned over quite a way to see past his stomach, and, sure enough, blood was dripping from his underpants.

“Oh no,” he groaned, then stuck his hand inside his underwear and pulled out a small, leaking bag that looked like the sort of thing you hope your child won't notice when you pass it on the motorway. He ran toward the bathroom, but tripped over the edge of the carpet in the living room and fell headfirst, and the bag of blood flew out of his hands and the contents exploded across the floor.

“What the...?” Roger exclaimed.

Lennart gasped breathlessly: “Don't worry! It's stage blood! I had a bag of it in my underpants, because sometimes you need that little bit extra in the whole 'rabbit on the toilet' routine to really frighten people away.”

“I didn't order this!” Anna-Lena was quick to point out.

“No, it's an optional extra,” Lennart confirmed, getting clumsily to his feet.

“Go and put some pants on,” Julia said sharply.

“Yes, please do,” Anna-Lena pleaded.

Lennart obeyed them and set off toward the closet. When he came back out, Zara had just come in from the balcony. It was the first time she'd seen him with clothes on, without the rabbit's head. It was an improvement, she had to admit to herself. She didn't hate him.

The rest of them were staring at the blood on the carpet and floor, uncertain about what they ought to do now.

“Nice color, anyway,” Ro said.

“Very modern!” Estelle nodded, because she'd heard on the radio recently that murder was fashionable in popular culture at the moment.

Roger, in the meantime, was naturally feeling an increasing need for information, so he turned to the real estate agent and interrogated her: “Where the hell have you been?”

Embarrassed, the Realtor adjusted her rather too large and very crumpled jacket.

“Well, you see, when the viewing started I was in the closet.”

“What for?” Roger demanded.

“I was nervous. I always am before any big viewing, so I usually shut myself in the bathroom, for a couple of minutes to give myself a pep talk. You know, 'You can do this! You're a strong, independent real estate agent and this apartment will be sold, by you!' But the bathroom was occupied, so I went into the closet. And then I heard...”

She gestured politely but nervously toward the woman standing in the middle of the room with her mask in one hand and the pistol in the other. Estelle intervened helpfully and said: "Yes, this is the bank robber, but she isn't dangerous! She's just been holding us hostage, but we've been very well looked after. We're going to get pizza!"

The bank robber nodded apologetically to the real estate agent and said: "Sorry. Don't worry, this isn't a real pistol."

The real estate agent smiled in relief and went on: “Well, I was in the closet, and then I heard someone scream 'We're being robbed.' And then I suppose I acted on instinct.”

“What do you mean by on instinct?” Roger wanted to know.

The real estate agent started to brush off her jacket.

“I've actually got several viewings over the next few weeks. The House Tricks Real Estate Agency has a duty to its clients. So I thought, I can't die. That would have been irresponsible of me. And then I discovered the hatch in the ceiling, so I climbed up there and hid.”

“All this time?” Roger wondered.

The real estate agent nodded so hard that her back creaked. “I hoped I might be able to crawl out of the other end somehow, but I couldn't.” Then she seemed to think of something important and clapped her hands together and exclaimed: “Well, goodness, look at me standing here chattering away. First and foremost, How's tricks? How lovely that so many of you were able to come to this viewing, is there anyone who'd like to make an offer on the apartment straightaway?”

The assembled gathering didn't look particularly impressed by the question. So the agent threw her arms out happily.

“Would you like to look around a bit more? No problem! I haven't got any other viewings today!”

Roger's eyebrows sank.

“Why are you even holding a viewing the day before New Year's Eve? I've never experienced that before. And I've attended quite a few viewings, I can tell you.”

The real estate agent looked as cheerful as only a real estate agent who's recently been released from a confined space can look.

“It was one of the seller's requests, and I didn't mind, because at the House Tricks Real Estate Agency, every day is a working day!”

The others collectively rolled their eyes at this. All except Estelle, who shivered and asked: “It's cold in here, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is, isn't it? Cooler than Roger had budgeted for!” Ro exclaimed, to lighten the mood, then regretted it at once because Roger's mood didn't seem to have been lightened at all.

Julia, who by now was aching in most parts of her body, and who had run out of patience altogether, elbowed her way past them all and went and closed the balcony door. Then she went over to the open fireplace and started to sort out the wood.

“We might as well light a fire while we wait for the pizzas.”

The bank robber stood in the middle of the room with the pistol in her hand, for all the good that was doing. She looked at the group of hostages, which had now grown by one more person, which the bank robber could only assume would increase the length of her prison sentence proportionately. So she sighed: "You don't have to wait for the pizzas. You can all go now. I'll give up and let the police do... well, whatever they're thinking of doing. You can all go first, I'll wait here, so that no one else gets hurt.

I never meant to... take anyone hostage. I just needed money for the rent so my ex-husband's lawyer wouldn't take my daughters away from me. It was... sorry... I'm an idiot, you didn't deserve any of this... sorry."

Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she was no longer making any attempt to stop them. Maybe it was the fact that she looked so small that got to the others. Or maybe they each in turn found themselves thinking about what they'd actually experienced that day, and what it had meant for them. Suddenly they all started to protest at the same time, talking over each other:

“But you can't just...,” Estelle began.

“You haven't hurt anyone!” Anna-Lena went on.

“There must be some way of solving this,” Julia nodded.

“Perhaps we could find a way out?” Lennart suggested.

“We certainly need a bit of time to gather all the information before you let us go!” Roger declared.

“And the bidding hasn't even started yet,” the real estate agent piped up.

“We could just wait for the pizzas, couldn't we?” Ro suggested.

“Yes, let's have something to eat. This has all turned out to be rather pleasant, hasn't it, getting to know each other like this? And that's all thanks to you!” Estelle beamed.

“I'm sure the police won't shoot you. Not much, anyway,” Anna-Lena said comfortingly.

“Why don't we all go outside with you? They won't fire if we all leave at the same time!” Julia insisted.

“There must be a way out, if it's possible to sneak into a viewing, then it must be possible to sneak out,” Lennart pointed out.

“Let's all sit down and make a plan!” Roger demanded.

“And make bids on the apartment!” the real estate agent added hopefully.

“And eat pizza!” Ro said.

The bank robber looked at each of them in turn for a long time. Then she whispered gratefully: “Worst hostages ever.”

"Help me lay the table," Estelle said, taking her by the arm.

The bank robber didn't resist, and went with Estelle into the kitchen. She returned with glasses and plates. Julia carried on sorting out the fire. Zara wrestled with her personality for a while, then handed Julia her lighter without her having asked for it.

Roger was standing beside the fireplace, unsure of how to make himself useful, and said to Julia: “Do you know how to do that?”

Julia glared at him, and was about to tell him that her mom had taught her how to make a fire, in such a way that Roger couldn't be sure that didn't mean Julia and her mother had set fire to her father. But it had been a long day, they had all heard one another's stories, and that made it harder to dislike one another, so Julia said something incredibly generous instead.

“No. Can you show me how to do it?”

Roger nodded slowly, crouched down, and started to talk to the wood.

“We can... I'm assuming we can, unless you... we can do it together,” he mumbled.

She swallowed and nodded.

“I'd like that.”

“Thanks,” he said quietly.

Then he showed her how he usually started fires.

“Is it supposed to smoke that much?” Julia wondered.

“There's something wrong with the wood,” Roger grunted.

“Really?”

“There's something wrong with the damn wood, I tell you!”

“Have you opened the damper?”

“Of course I've opened the damn damper!”

Julia opened the damper. Roger muttered under his breath and she started to laugh. He joined in. They weren't looking at each other, but the smoke was stinging their eyes and tears were streaming down their cheeks. Julia glanced at him.

"Your wife's nice," she said.

“So's yours,” he replied.

They each poked at separate pieces of wood in the fireplace.

“If you and Anna-Lena would really like the apartment, then—" Julia began, but he interrupted her.

“No. No. This is a good apartment for children. You and Ro should buy it.”

“I don't think Ro wants it, she finds fault with everything,” Julia sighed.

Roger poked harder at the fire.

“She's just scared she isn't good enough for you and the baby. You need to tell her that's nonsense. She's worried she won't be able to mend the baseboards herself, so you'll just have to tell her that no one can fix the damn baseboards until they've done it once. Everybody has to start somewhere!”

Julia let that sink in. She stared into the fire. Roger did the same. Each of them staring at a different piece of wood, a bit of flame, a lot of smoke.

“Can I say something personal, Roger?” she whispered after a while.

“Hmm.”

“You don't have to prove anything to Anna-Lena. You don't have to prove anything to anyone anymore. You're good enough.”

They each poked at the fire. And they both got a hell of a lot of smoke in their eyes. They said nothing more.

There was a knock at the door. Because the policeman outside had finally figured out that the doorbell didn't work.

"I'll get it," the bank robber said.

“No! What if it's the police?!” Ro exclaimed.

“It's probably just the pizzas,” the bank robber guessed.

“Are you mad? The police would never send a pizza delivery guy into a hostage situation! I mean, you're armed and dangerous!” Ro said.

“I'm not dangerous,” the bank robber said, hurt.

“I didn't mean it like that,” Ro said, apologetically.

Roger got to his feet over by the fireplace, which was smoking considerably less now, and pointed at the bank robber with a lump of wood as if it were his hand.

“Ro's right. If you open the door, the police might shoot you. It would be better if I went!”

Julia agreed, albeit a little too readily for Roger's liking. “Yes! Let Roger go! Who knows? We might manage to come up with a way to help you escape, and then the police will never know that you're a woman. Everyone will just assume that the bank robber's a man!”

"Why?" Roger wondered.

“Because women aren't usually that stupid,” Zara interjected, ever helpful.

The bank robber sighed hesitantly. But Anna-Lena took a tiny, tiny step toward the middle of the room and whispered: “Please, don't open the door, Roger. What if they shoot?”

Roger got some smoke in his eyes, even though there wasn't any now. He didn't say anything. So Lennart stepped forward and said: "Oh, let me do it! Give me the mask and I'll pretend to be the hostage taker. I'm an actor, after all — I was in The Merchant of Venice at the local theater."

“Isn't it The Merchant from Venice?” Anna-Lena wondered.

“Is it?” Lennart asked.

“Oh, I like that play, there's a lovely line in it. Something about a light!” Estelle declared happily, but she couldn't for the life of her remember what it was.

“God, just stop babbling and concentrate for a minute!” Julia snapped, because there had just been another knock on the door.

Lennart nodded and held his hand out to the bank robber. “Give me the mask and pistol.”

“No, give them here, I'll go!” Roger snapped, with a renewed need for validation.

The two men squared up against each other, as well as they could. Roger would probably have liked to hit Lennart again, all the more so now that the rabbit's head was gone. But perhaps Lennart could see how much Roger was hurting, so before Roger had time to clench his fists, he said: "Don't be angry with your wife, Roger. Be angry with me."

Roger still looked angry, but that must have struck home somewhere, making a tiny crack in his anger where the air slowly seeped out of it.

“I...,” he grunted, not looking at Anna-Lena.

“Let me do this,” Lennart asked.

“Please, darling,” Anna-Lena whispered.

Roger looked up, only as far as her chin, and saw it was quivering. And he backed down. It could have been a touching moment, actually, if only he could have stopped himself muttering: “For what it's worth, I hope they shoot you in the leg, Lennart.”

It was nicer than it sounded.

At that moment Estelle managed to remember the line from the play, so she declared: "That light we see is burning in my hall. How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world."

There was another she remembered now, such a want-wit sadness makes of me, but she didn't say that one out loud because she didn't want to spoil the mood. The bank robber looked at the little old lady.

“I'm so sorry, I've only just remembered that you were waiting for your husband—Knut, wasn't it? He was parking the car when I... he must be so worried!” she said, distraught with guilt.

Estelle patted the bank robber's arm.

“No, don't worry about that. Knut's already dead.”

The bank robber's face turned white.

“While you've been in here? He died while you were here...? Oh, dear Lord...”

Estelle shook her head.

“No, no, no. He's been dead awhile. The whole world doesn't revolve around you, dear.”

“I...,” the bank robber managed to say.

Estelle patted her arm.

“I just said Knut was parking the car because I get lonely sometimes. And it feels better to pretend that he's on his way. Especially at this time of year, he always used to like New Year, we used to stand at the kitchen window watching the fireworks.

Well... we used to stand on the balcony for years... but I couldn't bring myself to go out there after something that happened down on the bridge ten years ago. It's a long story. Anyway, Knut and I used to stand in the kitchen watching the fireworks through the window, and... oh, you miss such peculiar things.

I almost miss that more than anything. Knut loved fireworks, so I suppose I always feel extra lonely at New Year. I'm such a silly old woman.”

Everyone else had fallen silent, listening as she related this. It could have been a touching moment, actually, if Zara hadn't cleared her throat at the other end of the room.

“Everyone thinks Christmas is when most people kill themselves. That's a myth. Far more people commit suicide at New Year.”

That spoiled the mood. It's hard to deny that it did.

Lennart looked at Roger, Roger looked at the bank robber, the bank robber looked at them all. Then she nodded decisively. When the apartment door was finally opened, Jim the police officer was standing outside. A short while later he went back down to the street and told his son he'd spoken to the bank robber.

Jack stomps out of the interview room, exhausted with anger. The real estate agent is still sitting in there, terrified, looking on as the younger of the two police officers starts to march up and down the corridor. Then she turns hopefully to the older officer, who is still seated in the room, looking sad. Jim doesn't seem to know what to do with his hands, or any other part of his body, for that matter, so he just passes the glass of water to her. It shakes, even though she's holding it with all ten digits.

“You have to believe me, I swear I'm not the bank robber...,” she pleads.

Jim glances out at the corridor, where his son is walking around hitting the walls with his fists. Then Jim nods to the Realtor, hesitates, nods again, stops himself, then finally puts his hand very briefly on her shoulder and admits: “I know.”

She looks surprised. He looks ashamed.

When the old policeman—and he's never felt older than he does right now—lifts his hand, he toys with his wedding ring. An old habit, but scant comfort. He's always felt that the hardest thing about death is the grammar. Often he still says the wrong thing, and Jack hardly ever corrects him, sons probably don't have the heart to do that. Jack mentions the ring once every six months or so, saying: “Dad, isn't it time you took that off?” His dad nods, as if he'd just forgotten about it, tugs it a little as if it fits more tightly than it actually does, and mumbles: “I will, I will.” He never does.

The hardest thing about death is the grammar, the tense, the fact that she won't be angry when she sees that he's bought a new sofa without consulting her first. She won't be anything. She isn't on her way home. She was. And she really did get angry that time Jim bought a new sofa without consulting her first, goodness, how angry she was.

She could travel halfway around the world to the worst chaos on the planet, but when she came home everything had to be exactly the way it always was or she got upset. Of course that was just one of her many strange little habits and quirks: she put onion flakes on breakfast cereal and poured béarnaise sauce on popcorn, and if you yawned when she was next to you, she would lean forward and stick a finger in your mouth, just to see if she could pull it out again before you closed your mouth. Sometimes she put cornflakes in Jim's shoes, sometimes little bits of boiled egg and anchovies in Jack's pockets, and the looks on their faces when they realized seemed to amuse her more and more each time she did it. That's the kind of thing you miss.

That she used to do this, that she used to do that. She was, she is. She was Jim's wife. Jack's mom is dead.

The grammar. That's the worst thing of all, Jim thinks. So he really wants his son to be able to pull this off, solve the whole thing, save everyone. It just doesn't seem to be working.

He goes out into the corridor. Looks at Jack. They're alone out there, no one can overhear their conversation. The son turns around, despairing.

“It must be the real estate agent who did it, Dad, it must be...,” he manages to say, but the words get weaker and weaker the further into the sentence he gets.

Jim shakes his head, painfully slowly.

“No. It isn't her. The bank robber wasn't in the apartment when you stormed in, son, you're right about that. But she didn't leave with the hostages, either.”

Jack's eyes dart wildly around the corridor. He clenches his fists, looking for something else to hit.

“How do you know that, Dad? How the hell do you know that?!” he yells, as if he were yelling at the sea.

Jim blinks as if he were trying to hold back the tide.

“Because I didn't tell you the truth, son.”

And then he does.

All the witnesses from the hostage drama were released at the same time. In a way, this story stops as suddenly for them as it began. They gather their things and are shepherded gently out onto the little flight of steps at the back of the police station. When the door closes behind them they look at each other in surprise: the real estate agent, Zara, Lennart, Anna-Lena, Roger, Ro, Julia, and Estelle.

“What did the police say to you?” Roger immediately asks the others.

“They asked loads of questions, but Jules and I just played dumb!” Ro declared happily.

“How clever of you,” Zara says.

“So none of the police said anything particular to any of you at all when they let you go?” Roger demands to know.

They all shake their heads. The young police officer, Jack, had just gone from room to room, saying no more except that they were free to go, and that he was sorry it had taken such a long time. The only thing he was careful to say was that they wouldn't be leaving via the front entrance of the police station, because there were reporters waiting out there.

So now the little group is gathered at the back of the station, glancing nervously at each other. In the end Anna-Lena asks the question they're all thinking: “Is she... okay? When we left the apartment I saw a police officer standing in the stairwell, that older one, and I thought: How on earth is she going to get into the other apartment now?”

“Exactly! When the police told me the pistol was real and that they'd heard a shot from inside the apartment, I thought... ugh...” The real estate agent nods, without wanting to finish the thought.

“Who helped her get out if it wasn't us?” Roger wants to know, eager for correct information.

No one has an answer to that, but Estelle looks down at her phone, reads a text message, and nods slowly. Then she smiles, relieved.

“She says she's okay.”

Anna-Lena smiles at that.

“Say hi from us.”

Estelle says she will.

Behind them a woman in her twenties emerges from the police station on her own. She's trying to look confident, but her eyes are darting about wildly in search of somewhere to go, and someone to go there with.

“Are you okay, dear?” Estelle wonders.

“What? Why are you asking?” London snaps.

Julia looks at the name badge on London's blouse; she never took it off after she left work for the interview.

“Were you the person working at the counter in the bank that got robbed?”

London nods hesitantly.

"Oh my, were you very frightened?" Estelle wonders.

London nods, not as if she means to, but as if her body is answering for her when her brain doesn't dare.

“Not at the time. Not... when it happened. But afterward. When I... you know, when I found out that it might have been a real pistol after all.”

The others on the steps nod understandingly. Ro puts her hands in the dress pockets beneath her coat, inclines her head toward a small café on the other side of the street, and says: “Do you fancy a coffee?”

London feels like lying and saying that she has places to be, people to see, because it's, like, New Year's Eve tomorrow. But instead she says: "I don't like coffee."

“We'll find something else for you,” Ro promises.

That's a nice thing to promise someone, so London nods slowly. Ro becomes the first friend she's had in a long time. Ever, perhaps.

“Wait for me!” Julia says.

“What? Worried I'm going to get robbed if I go on my own or something?” Ro grins.

Julia doesn't grin. Ro clears her throat and mumbles: "Okay, okay, too soon to make jokes about it, I get it, I get it!"

As they cross the street London whispers to her: "That wasn't a very good joke."

“Who are you, the joke police, or what?” Ro grunts.

“Darling! If you get shot, I'm going to give your birds away!” Julia calls behind them.

“Now that was funny!” London chuckles. She hasn't had anything to laugh at for a long time. Ever, perhaps.

She receives a letter a few days later, written by a bank robber who wants to apologize, which means more to the twenty-year-old than she can admit to anyone for many years. Not until she falls in love, in fact. But that's an entirely different story.

Julia hugs everyone on the steps and is hugged back in turn. When she gets to Estelle, the young woman and the much older one look into each other's eyes for a long time. Estelle says: "There's a book I'd like to give you. By my favorite poet."

Julia smiles.

“I was thinking that maybe we could meet up, you and me. Now and then. Maybe we can exchange books in the elevator.”

“How do you mean?” Estelle wonders.

Julia turns to the real estate agent.

“Will you sort out the paperwork?”

The real estate agent nods so enthusiastically that she actually starts to jump off the ground. Roger finds himself grinning as well, suddenly delighted.

“So you and Ro bought the apartment after all? Did you get a good price?” Julia shakes her head.

“No. Not that apartment. We bought the other one.”

Roger laughs out loud at that. It's been a while since he last did that. That makes Anna-Lena so happy that she has to sit down, in the middle of the steps, in the middle of winter.

The truth the truth the truth.

65

So, Jim came back down to the street and told Jack what had just happened inside the building, after he spoke to the bank robber. But that isn't quite what happened, not really. Not at all, in fact. In part that was because Jim was bad at telling stories, but it was mostly because he was very good at lying.

Because it wasn't Lennart who opened the door when Jim showed up with the pizzas. It was the bank robber, the real bank robber. Both Roger and Lennart had insisted on being allowed to wear the ski mask, but after a long pause she had said no. She had looked at them, her voice gentle with appreciation, then given them a determined nod.

“Obviously I can't set a good example to my daughters and teach them not to do idiotic things now. But I might at least be able to show them how you take responsibility for your actions.”

So when Jim knocked on the door again, she opened it. Without the mask. Her hair was draped over her shoulders, the same color as Jim's daughter's hair. Sometimes two strangers only need one thing in common to find each other sympathetic.

She saw the wedding ring on his finger, old and dented, tarnished silver. He saw hers, thin and discreet, gold, no gemstones. Neither of them had taken them off yet.

“Are you a police officer?” she asked so quickly that Jim lost his train of thought.

“How did you...?”

“I don't think the police would send a real pizza delivery guy if you thought I was armed and dangerous,” she smiled, more like her face actually cracking than cracking into a smile.

“No, no... well, yes... and yes, I am a police officer,” Jim nodded, holding the pizzas out.

“Thanks,” she said, taking them with one hand as the pistol dangled in the other. Jim couldn't take his eyes off it.

“How are you doing?” he asked, which he may not have done if she'd been wearing a mask.

“I'm not having the best day,” she confessed.

“Is anyone in there hurt?”

She shook her head in horror.

“I'd never...”

Jim looked at her, noting her trembling fingers and the bite marks on her lower lip. He couldn't hear anyone crying inside the apartment, there was no one shouting, no one who sounded afraid at all.

“I need you to put the pistol down for a little while,” he said.

The bank robber nodded apologetically. “Can I give them the pizzas first? They're hungry. It's been a long day for them... I...”

Jim nodded. She turned around and disappeared for a while, then came back without the boxes and without the pistol. From behind her, someone exclaimed, "That isn't a Hawaiian!" and someone else laughed: "You don't know a damn thing about Hawaiians!" Laughed. Then came the sound of idle chatter between strangers who were no longer quite that. It's probably hard to say precisely what would be normal in a hostage drama, but this certainly wasn't it. Jim looked intently at the bank robber.

“Can I ask, how did you get caught up in all this?”

The bank robber, now unarmed, took such a deep breath that she doubled in size, then she became smaller than ever.

“I don't know where to start.”

Then Jim did something deeply unprofessional. He reached out his hand and wiped a tear from the bank robber's cheek.

"My wife had a joke she used to like. How do you eat an elephant?"

“I don't know.”

“A bit at a time.”

She smiled.

“My kids would have liked that. They have a terrible sense of humor.”

Jim put his hands in his pockets and sat down heavily on the landing next to the door. The bank robber hesitated for a moment, then sat down with her legs crossed. Jim smiled.

“My wife had a terrible sense of humor as well. She liked laughing and causing trouble. The older she got, the more trouble she was. She always told me I was too nice. That's a terrible thing to be told by a priest, isn't it?”

The bank robber laughed quietly. Then nodded.

“Who did she used to cause trouble with?”

“Everyone. The church, the parish, politicians, people who believed in God, people who didn't believe in God... she made it her job to defend the weakest: the homeless, migrants, even criminals. Because somewhere in the Bible Jesus says something like: 'I was hungry and you gave me food, I was homeless and you looked after me, I was sick and you cared for me, I was in prison and you visited me.' And then He says something like, what we do for the weakest among us, we also do for Him. And she took everything so damn literally, my wife. That's why she kept causing trouble.”

“Has she passed away?”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry.”

He nodded gratefully. It's so odd, he thought, that still, after all this time, it feels so incomprehensible that she isn't here. That his heart hasn't gotten used to the fact that no giggling idiot is going to stick her finger in his mouth when he yawns, or pour flour in his pillowcase just as he's about to go to bed. No one to argue with him. Love him. There's no getting used to the grammar of it all. He smiled sadly and said: “Now your turn.”

“At what?” the bank robber said.

"Telling your story. About how you ended up here."

“How long a story do you want?”

“As long as you like. One bit at a time.”

Which was a nice thing to say. So the bank robber told him.

“My husband left me. Well, he kicked me out, actually. He'd been having an affair with my boss. They fell in love. They moved in together, in our apartment, because it was only in his name. Everything happened so quickly, and I didn't want to make a fuss or cause... chaos. For the children's sake.”

Jim nodded slowly. He looked at her ring and toyed with his own. There's nothing harder to remove.

“Girls or boys?”

“Girls.”

“I've got one of each.”

“I... someone needs to... I don't want them to...”

“Where are they now?”

“With their dad. I was supposed to pick them up tonight. We were going to celebrate New Year together. But now... I...”

She trailed off. Jim nodded thoughtfully.

“What did you need the money from the bank robbery for?”

The desperation on her face revealed the chaos in her heart as she said: “To pay the rent. I needed six thousand five hundred. My husband's lawyer was threatening to take the girls away from me if I didn't have anywhere to live.”

Jim held on to the handrail to stop himself collapsing as his heart broke. Empathy is like vertigo. Six thousand five hundred, because she thought she'd lose her children otherwise. Her children.

“There are rules, legislation, no one can just take your children away from you simply because...,” he began, then thought better of it and said: “But now they can... now you've held up a bank and...” His voice almost gave out as he whispered: “You poor child, what have you got yourself mixed up in?”

The woman had to force her tongue to move, her lips to open, as her smallest muscles seemed to have almost given up.

“I… I'm an idiot. I know, I know, I know. I didn't want to cause any trouble with my husband, I didn't want to expose the girls to that, I thought I might be able to sort it all out for myself. But all I've done is create chaos. It's my fault, it's all my fault. I'm ready to give up now, I'll let all the hostages go, I promise, the pistol's still in there, it isn't even real...

Jim couldn't help thinking that was one hell of a reason to rob a bank: because you're scared of conflict. He tried to see her as a criminal, tried to look at her without seeing his daughter, and failed at both.

“Even if you release the hostages and give up, you'll still end up in prison. Even if the pistol isn't real,” he said mournfully, and of course he'd been a police officer long enough to have seen that it was. He knew she wouldn't stand a chance, no matter how sympathetic any decent person might feel about her situation. You're not allowed to rob banks, you're not allowed to run around with firearms, and we can't let criminals like that go unpunished if we catch them. So Jim concluded there and then that the only way she wouldn't get punished was not to do that. Not to catch her.

He looked around in the stairwell. On the door of the apartment behind the bank robber was a real estate agent's sign bearing the text: For sale! house tricks Real Estate Agency! How's tricks? Jim stared at it for a while, ransacking his memory.

“That's odd,” he finally said.

“What is?” the bank robber wondered.

“House Tricks Real Estate Agency. That's a fairly… silly name.”

“Maybe,” the bank robber nodded, not having given it much thought before then.

Jim rubbed his nose.

“It might just be a coincidence, but I spoke to the couple who own the neighboring apartment on the phone a little while ago. They're splitting up. Because one of them likes coriander, and the other also likes coriander, but not quite as much, but apparently that's enough of a reason if you're young and are on the Internet.”

The corners of the bank robber's mouth tried to form a smile.

“No one wants to be bored anymore.”

She was thinking that the worst thing of all, the most impossible thing to reconcile herself to emotionally, was the fact that she still loved her husband. Every blood vessel felt like it was exploding every time that realization struck her. That she couldn't stop loving him, not even after everything he'd done, not even then could she stop herself wondering if it had all been her fault. Maybe she wasn't enough fun—maybe it's unreasonable to expect someone to stay with you if you're not fun.

“No, that's just it! Everything has to be like the first flush of infatuation for youngsters, nothing can be mundane, they've got the attention span of a kitten with a glittery rubber ball,” Jim agreed, suddenly excited, and went on: “So they're separating and selling the apartment. One of them couldn't remember what the real estate agent's name was, just that it was a silly name. And you know what? House Tricks Real Estate Agency—that's a really silly name!”

He pointed at the sign on the door of the apartment where the real estate agent was. Then at the door opposite. It was too small a town to have many estate agencies with silly names. It wasn't even big enough to have more than one hairdressing salon called The Upper Cut.

"Sorry, I don't understand the significance," the bank robber said.

Jim scratched his stubble.

“I was just thinking... is the real estate agent in there with you?”

The bank robber nodded.

“Yes, she's driving everyone mad. When I went in with the pizzas just now she was making Roger stand near the balcony, then she went and stood at the other end of the apartment, then she threw her keys to him so he could see how far you could throw something because it's all open plan.”

“How did that go?”

“Roger ducked. The window very nearly broke,” the bank robber smiled. It was a friendly smile, Jim thought. Not the sort that wants to hurt anyone. He looked at the sign again.

“I don't know... this might be... but if it is the same real estate agent who's going to sell the neighboring apartment, then maybe she's got the keys to that one with her, and then...”

He couldn't quite bring himself to say it.

“What do you mean?” the bank robber said.

Jim pulled himself together, stood up, and cleared his throat.

“What I mean is that if the real estate agent is also selling the next apartment, and if she's got the keys with her, then perhaps you could hide in there. When the other police officers come up here, they won't break open all the doors to the other apartments to look for you, not right away, at least.”

"Why not?"

Jim shrugged. “Because we're not that good. Everyone will be concentrating on getting the hostages out first, and if you tell them to close the door behind them, then everyone will assume that the bank robber... you... are still in the apartment. This apartment. Then, once we've smashed the door in and discovered you're not there, we can't just smash the other doors in willy-nilly, that would cause a huge stink.

Bureaucracy, you know. We'll have to take the hostages to the station first and get witness statements from them and, I don't know... you might be able to come up with a way of getting out. And you know what?

If anyone were to find you in the other apartment, you can always pretend you live there! We've been assuming that the bank robber is a man right from the start.”

The bank robber was still wide-eyed and uncomprehending.

"Why?" she asked again.

“Because women don't normally do… this sort of thing,” Jim said, as diplomatically as he could.

She shook her head.

“No, I mean, why? Why are you doing this for me? You're a police officer! I mean, you're not supposed to do this sort of thing for me!”

Jim nodded feebly. He rubbed his hands on his pants, then his wrists across his brow.

“My wife used to quote some guy who said... what was it? He said that even if he knew that the world was going to hell tomorrow, he'd plant an apple tree today.”

“That's lovely,” the bank robber whispered.

Jim nodded. He wiped the back of his hand over his eyes.

“I don't want to… catch you. I know you've made a big mistake here, but… that sort of thing happens.”

“Thank you.”

“You need to go in and ask the real estate agent if she's got the keys to the other apartment. Because it won't be long before my son loses patience and comes storming in here, and then...”

The bank robber blinked several times.

"Sorry? Your son?"

“He's a police officer, too. He'll be the first one through the door.”

The bank robber felt her throat tighten and her voice faltered.

“He sounds brave.”

“He had a brave mom. She would have robbed banks for his sake, if she'd had to. I didn't even believe in God when we met. She was beautiful, I wasn't. She could dance, I could barely stay on my feet. Back when we first met, the way we thought about our work was probably all we had in common. The fact that we save those we can.”

“I don't know if I deserve to be saved,” the bank robber whispered.

Jim just nodded, looked her in the eye, an honest, decent man about to do something that went against the principles of a profession he's belonged to all his adult life.

“Come and find me in ten years' time and tell me if I was wrong.”

He turned to go. She hesitated, swallowed hard, then called: "Wait!"

“Yes?”

“Can I... Is it too late to make a demand in exchange for releasing the hostages?”

“What the hell...?”

He raised his eyebrows, then frowned, at first taken aback, then almost annoyed. The bank robber was trying to make her mind up.

“Fireworks,” she eventually said. “There's an old lady in here who always used to watch the fireworks with her husband. He's dead now. I've been holding her hostage all day. I'd like to give her some fireworks.”

Jim grinned. Nodded.

Then he went downstairs and lied to his son.

The bank robber went back inside the apartment. There was blood on the floor, but the fire was crackling in the hearth. Ro was sitting on the sofa eating pizza and making Julia laugh. Roger and the real estate agent were arguing about the measurements on the plan, not because Roger was thinking about buying the apartment anymore, but because “it's pretty damn important that you're given the correct information.” Zara and Lennart were standing by the window.

Zara was eating a slice of pizza, and Lennart was having fun watching the expression of disgust on her face. It didn't look as if she liked him, it really didn't, but she didn't seem to hate him, either. He in turn seemed to think she was wonderful.

Anna-Lena was standing on her own, holding a plate in one hand, but the pizza on it was untouched and going cold. Naturally it was Julia who spotted her and got up from the sofa. She went over and asked: "Are you okay, Anna-Lena?"

Anna-Lena looked over at Roger. They still hadn't talked since the rabbit emerged from the bathroom.

“Yes,” she lied.

Julia took hold of her arm, encouragingly rather than to comfort her.

“I don't exactly know what you think you've done wrong, but the fact that you hired Lennart all those times so that Roger would feel like a winner is one of the daftest, weirdest, most romantic things I've ever heard!”

Anna-Lena prodded the pizza on her plate tentatively.

“Roger should have had a chance at being promoted. I always thought, next year it'll be his turn. But time goes faster than you think, all those years all at once. Sometimes I think that when you live together for a very long time, and have children together, life is a bit like climbing trees. Up and down, up and down, you try to cope with everything, be good, you climb and climb and climb, and you hardly ever see each other along the way. You don't notice that when you're young, but everything changes when you have children, and sometimes it feels like you hardly ever see the person you married anymore.

You're parents and teammates, first and foremost, and being married slips down the list of priorities. But you... well, you keep climbing trees, and see each other along the way. I always thought that was just the way it is, life, the way it has to be. We just had to get through everything, I thought. And I kept telling myself that the important thing was that we kept climbing the same tree. Because then I thought that sooner or later... and this sounds so pretentious... but I thought that sooner or later we'd end up on the same branch.

And then we could sit there holding hands and looking at the view. That's what I thought we'd be doing when we got old. But time goes quicker than you think. And it never did get to be Roger's turn."

Julia was still holding her arm. Less in encouragement, more to comfort her.

“My mom always says I should never apologize for myself. Never say sorry for being good at something.”

Anna-Lena took a dubious bite of her pizza, then said with her mouth full: "Wise mom."

They stood there in silence.

And then there was a loud bang.

Once. Twice. A few seconds later came the whistling and explosions, so many and so close together that you couldn't count them. Lennart was standing closest to the window, so he was the one who exclaimed: "Look! Fireworks!"

Jim had sent a young officer from the station to buy them. He was setting them off from down by the bridge. Lennart, Zara, Julia, Ro, Anna-Lena, Roger, and the real estate agent went out onto the balcony.

They stood there watching in amazement. They weren't pathetic little bangers, either, they were the real thing, different colors, the sort that look like rain, the whole deal. Because, as luck would have it, Jim liked fireworks, too.

The bank robber and Estelle watched them from the kitchen window, arm in arm.

“Knut would have liked this,” Estelle nodded.

“I hope you like it, too,” the bank robber managed to say.

“Very much, you sweet child, very much indeed. Thank you!”

“I'm so sorry for everything I've done to you all,” the bank robber sniffed.

Estelle pouted her lips unhappily.

“Perhaps we could explain everything to the police? Tell them it was all a mistake?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Perhaps you could escape somehow? Hide somewhere?”

Estelle smelled of wine. Her pupils were ever so slightly unfocused. The bank robber was about to reply, then realized that the less Estelle knew, the better. Then the old woman wouldn't have to lie for the bank robber's sake when she was questioned by the police. So she said: "No, I don't think that would work."

Estelle held her hand. There wasn't much else she could do. The fireworks were beautiful, Knut would have loved them.

When they were finished the bank robber went into the living room, and the others all came back in from the balcony. The bank robber tried to signal discreetly that she wanted to talk to the real estate agent, but sadly that was impossible given that the real estate agent was busy arguing with Roger about the price Julia and Ro ought to pay for the apartment if they bought it.

“Okay, then! Okay!” the real estate agent finally snapped. “I can go a bit lower, but only because I have to put the other apartment up for sale in two weeks' time, and I don't want that competing with this one!"

Roger, Julia, and Ro all tilted their heads in such a way that they bumped into one another.

“Which... other apartment?” Roger asked.

The real estate agent harumphed, annoyed with herself for having let that slip out.

“The apartment opposite, on the other side of the elevator. I haven't even put it up on my website yet, because if you sell two apartments at the same time, you get less for both, all good real estate agents know that. The other apartment looks just the same as this one, only with a slightly smaller closet, but for some reason it has excellent mobile reception and that seems to be ridiculously important for people these days. The couple who own it are splitting up, they had a terrible row in my office, they've removed all the furniture from the apartment, the only thing left in there is a juicer. And I can quite see why neither of them would want it, because it's a truly terrible color...”

The real estate agent went on babbling for a long time, but no one was really listening anymore. Roger and Julia looked at each other, then at the bank robber, then at the real estate agent.

“Hang on, you're saying you're going to be selling the neighboring apartment as well? The one on the other side of the elevator? And... there's no one living there at the moment?” Julia asked, just to be sure.

The real estate agent stopped babbling and started to nod instead. Julia looked at the bank robber, and of course they were both thinking exactly the same thing, a possible solution to all this.

“Have you got the keys to the other apartment?” Julia asked with a hopeful smile, convinced that this would be a perfect end to the whole thing.

Unfortunately the real estate agent looked back at Julia as if that were a ridiculous question. “Why would I? I'm not even going to start trying to sell it for another two weeks, and do you think I carry people's keys around just for the fun of it? What sort of real estate agent do you take me for?”

Roger sighed. Julia sighed, more deeply. The bank robber wasn't even breathing, just tumbling headlong into the hopelessness inside her.

“I had an affair once!” Estelle said cheerfully from the other end of the apartment, because she'd found another bottle of wine in the kitchen.

“Not now, Estelle,” Julia said, but the old woman was insistent. She was slightly drunk, that can't be denyed, because the closet had already provided quite a lot of wine for an elderly lady.

“I had an affair once!” she repeated, with her eyes fixed on the bank robber's, and the bank robber suddenly felt nervous about the possible details that might slip out in a story that started like that. Estelle waved the wine bottle and went on: “He loved books, and so did I, but my husband didn't. Knut liked music. I suppose music's all right, but it's not the same, is it?”

The bank robber shook her head politely.

“No. I like books, too.”

“I thought as much from looking at you! As if you understand that people need fairy tales as well, not just narrative. I've liked you from the moment you came in here, you know. You messed things up a bit, with the pistol and all that, but who hasn't messed things up at one time or another? All interesting people have done something really stupid at least once! For instance, I had an affair, behind Knut's back, with a man who loved books, just like me. Whenever I read anything now I think of the pair of them, because he gave me a key, and I never told Knut that I kept it.”

“Please, Estelle, we're trying to...,” Julia said, but Estelle ignored her. She ran one hand along the bookcase. One of the last times she met her neighbor in the elevator he gave her a very thick book, written by a man. He had underlined one sentence, several hundred pages in: We are asleep until we fall in love. Estelle gave him a book in exchange, one written by a woman, so it didn't need hundreds of pages to say things. Close to the start Estelle had underlined: Love is wanting you to exist.

Her fingers traced the spines of the books on the shelf, as if she were dreaming, not as if she were looking. A book fell out from the middle of a row, not as if it had done so on purpose, but simply because her fingernails happened to touch its spine. It landed on the floor and fell open a few pages in. The key that fell out bounced off the pages, then landed on the parquet floor with a tinkling sound.

Estelle's chest was rising and falling breathlessly and her voice may have been slurred but her eyes were crystal clear when she said: “When Knut fell ill we signed the apartment over to our daughter. I thought she might want to move in here with her children, but that was obviously a silly idea. They didn't want to live here.

They've got their own lives, in a place of their own. Since then there's only been me here, and... well, you can see... it's too big for me. This isn't a sensible apartment for a single person. So in the end my daughter said we ought to sell it and buy something smaller for me, something easier to look after, she said.

So I called several different real estate agents and obviously they all said that it wasn't usual to hold a viewing so close to New Year, but I wanted... well, I thought it would be nice to have a bit of company at this time of year. So I went out before the real estate agent arrived, then I came back up once the viewing had started and pretended to be a prospective buyer. Because I didn't want to sell the apartment without knowing who was going to be buying it. This isn't just an apartment, it's my home, I don't want to hand it over to someone who's just going to be passing through, to make money from it. I want someone who's going to love living here, like I have. Maybe that's hard for a young person to understand.”

That wasn't true. There wasn't a single person in the apartment who didn't understand perfectly. But the real estate agent cleared her throat.

“So... when your daughter commissioned me, I wasn't the first person she'd called?”

“Oh, no, she called all the other real estate agents before she felt obliged to ring you. But just look how it's all turned out!” Estelle smiled.

The real estate agent brushed the dust off her jacket and her ego.

“So this is the key to...,” the bank robber began, staring at it but still not quite able to believe it.

“My affair. He lived in the neighboring apartment, on the other side of the elevator. That's where he died. I was standing in front of the bookcase when the apartment was put up for sale, and I wondered what would have happened if I'd met him first, before Knut. You can let yourself do that when you get old, go for a little stroll in your imagination. A young couple bought the apartment. They never changed the lock.”

Julia cleared her throat, rather taken aback.

“How... sorry, Estelle, but how do you know that?”

Estelle gave her an embarrassed little smile.

“Every so often I... well, I've never actually opened the door, of course, I'm not a criminal, but I... sometimes I check to see if the key still fits. It does. It doesn't surprise me that they're splitting up, that young couple, it really doesn't, because I often used to hear them arguing when I was smoking in the closet. The walls are rather thin in there. You get to hear all sorts of things. Some of it would shock even Stockholmers, I can tell you.”

The bank robber put the book back on the shelf. Clutched the key tightly. Then she turned to the others and whispered: “I don't know what to say.”

“Don't say anything at all. Go and hide in the other apartment until this is all over. Then you can go home to your daughters,” Estelle said.

The key was dancing in the bank robber's palm when she unclenched her fist, she couldn't hold it still.

“I haven't got a home to go back to. I can't pay the rent. And I can't ask any of you to lie for my sake when you talk to the police. They're going to ask who I am and if you know where I'm hiding, and I don't want you to lie for me!”

“Of course we're going to lie for you,” Ro exclaimed.

“Don't worry about us,” Julia cajoled.

“We don't actually have to lie, any of us,” Roger said. “We just need to play dumb.”

“Yes, well, there's no problem, then, is there? Because that's hardly going to be a challenge for any of you!” Zara declared. For once, it wasn't actually meant as an insult, it just sounded like it.

Anna-Lena nodded thoughtfully at the bank robber.

“Roger's right. We just have to play dumb. We can say you never took the mask off, so we can't give a description.”

The bank robber tried to protest. They didn't give her a chance. Then there was a knock at the door, and Roger went into the hall and peered through the spyhole, and saw Jim standing outside. That was when Roger realized what the real problem was.

“Damn. That policeman's out in the stairwell, how are you going to get past him into the other apartment without him seeing you? We didn't think of that!” he exclaimed.

“Perhaps we could distract him?” Julia suggested.

“I could squirt lime juice in his eyes!” Ro nodded.

“Perhaps we could just try reasoning with him?” Estelle said hopefully.

“Unless we all run out at once so he gets confused!” Anna-Lena said, thinking out loud.

“Naked! People always get more confused when you're naked!” Lennart informed them, in his capacity as an expert.

Zara was standing next to him, and he was probably expecting her to tell him he was a damn idiot, but instead she said: “Perhaps we could bribe him. The policeman. Most men can be bought.”

Lennart of course noticed that she could have said “most people,” she didn't have to say “most men,” but he couldn't help thinking it was a nice gesture on her part to try to be part of the group.

The bank robber stood in front of them for a long while with the key in her hand, on the brink of telling them about Jim, but instead she said thoughtfully: "No. If I tell you how I'm going to escape, you'd have to lie when the police question you. But if you just walk out of here now and go downstairs, you can tell the truth: when you closed the door behind you, I was still in here. You don't know what happened to me after that."

They looked like they wanted to protest (all except Zara), but eventually nodded in response (even Zara). Estelle put some clingwrap over the remains of the pizza and put it in the fridge. She wrote her phone number on a scrap of paper, put it in the bank robber's pocket, and whispered: "Send me a text when you're safe, otherwise I'll worry." The bank robber promised. Then all the hostages walked out of the apartment.

Roger went last, and carefully closed the door behind him until he heard the latch click. Jim directed them to walk down the stairs, where Jack was waiting to escort them into the police cars that would drive them to the station to be questioned.

Jim was left alone in the stairwell for a while, and waited until Jack came up the stairs.

“Is the bank robber still in there now? Are you sure, Dad?” Jack asked.

“One hundred percent,” Jim said.

“Good! The negotiator's going to call the phone in there shortly and try to get him to come out voluntarily. Otherwise we'll have to break the door in.”

Jim nodded. Jack looked around, then crouched down by the elevator and picked up a piece of paper.

“What's this?”

“Looks like a drawing?” Jim said.

Jack put it in his pocket. Looked at the time. The negotiator made the call.

It had been tucked inside one of the pizza boxes, the special telephone thingy. It was Ro who had found it. She was very hungry, so she just thought it was odd to find a phone in a pizza box, put it down, and decided to eat first before bothering to think about it. And by the time she'd finished eating she'd forgotten all about it. There was so much else going on, the fireworks and all the rest of it, and perhaps you had to know Ro to understand just how absentminded she could be. But perhaps it's enough to know that once she'd finished her own pizza, she opened all the other boxes and ate the crusts the others had left. At that point Roger turned to her and said she needn't worry, he was sure she was going to be a good parent now, because good parents eat other people's crusts out of other people's boxes just like that. Hearing that meant so much to Ro that she burst into tears.

So the phone was left on the little three-legged table beside the sofa, as unsteady as a spider on an ice cube. When all the hostages had gone, the bank robber put her pistol down next to the phone, after wiping it carefully first, of course, because Roger had seen a documentary about how the police find fingerprints at crime scenes. She also threw her ski mask on the fire, because Roger had said the cops might be able to get D.N.A and all sorts of other stuff off it otherwise.

Then the bank robber went out through the door. Jim was standing alone on the landing. They glanced at each other quickly, she gratefully, he full of stress. She showed him the key. He breethd out.

“Hurry up,” he said.

“I just want to say... I haven't told anyone you're doing this for me. I didn't want anyone to have to lie for me when they were questioned,” she said.

“Good,” he nodded.

She tried in vain to blink away the dampness in her eyes, because of course she knew she was actually asking someone to lie for her, more than he had ever lied for anyone. But Jim wouldn't let her apologize, just pushed her past the elevator door and whispered: "Good luck!"

She went inside the neighboring apartment and locked the door behind her. Jim was left standing on his own in the stairwell for a minute, which gave him time to think of his wife and hope she was proud of him. Or at least not really angry. With all the hostages safely on their way to the station, Jack came running up the stairs.

Then the negotiator made the call. And the pistol hit the floor.

Back in the police station, Jim has told Jack the truth, the whole truth. His son wants to be angry, he wishes he had the time, but because he's a good son he's busy trying to come up with a plan instead. Once they've let the witnesses leave through the back door of the police station, he sets off toward the main entrance at the front.

“You don't have to do this, son, I can go,” Jim says disconsolately. He stops himself from saying: Sorry I lied to you, but deep down you know I did the right thing.

Jack shakes his head firmly.

“No, Dad. Stay here.”

He stops himself from saying: You've caused enough problems. Then he walks out onto the steps at the front of the building and tells the waiting reporters everything they need to know. That Jack himself has been responsible for the whole of the police response, and that they have lost the perpetrator. That no one knows where he is now.

Some of the journalists start shouting accusing questions about “police incompetence,” others merely smirk as they take notes, ready to slaughter Jack in articles and blog posts a few hours from now. The shame and failure are Jack's alone, he carries them on his own, so that no one else gets blamed. Inside the station, his dad sits with his face in his hands.

The detectives from Stockholm arrive early the next morning, New Year's Eve. They read through all the witness statements, talk to Jack and Jim, check all the evidence. And then the Stockholmers snort, in voices more self-important than adverts for dishwashing liquid, that they really don't have the resources to do more than that. No one was hurt during the hostage drama, nothing was stolen in the robbery, so there aren't really any victims here. The Stockholmers need to focus their resources where they're really needed. Besides, it's New Year's Eve, and who wants to celebrate in a town as small as this?

They're going to be in a hurry to get home, and Jack and Jim will watch them drive off. The journalists will already have disappeared by then, on their way to the next big story. There's always another celebrity who might be on the point of getting divorced.

“You're a good police officer, son,” Jim will say, looking down at the ground. He'll want to add but an even better person, but won't be able to bring himself to say it.

“You're not always such a damn good police officer, Dad,” Jack will grin up at the clouds. He'll want to add but I've learned everything else from you, but the words won't quite come out.

They'll go home. Watch television. Have a beer together.

That's enough.

On the steps at the back of the police station Estelle hugs each of them in turn. (Except Zara, of course, who blocks her with her handbag and jumps out of the way when she tries.)

“I have to say, if you have to be held hostage, then there's no better company to be in than all of you.” Estelle smiles at them all. Even Zara.

“Would you like to come and have coffee with us?” Julia asks.

“No, no, I need to get home,” Estelle smiles, then she suddenly becomes serious and turns to the real estate agent: “I really am very sorry I changed my mind and didn't let you sell the apartment after all. But it's... home.”

The real estate agent shrugs.

“I think that's rather lovely, actually. People always think real estate agents just want to sell, sell, sell, but there's something… I don't quite know how to say it…”

Lennart fills in with the words she can't find: "There's something romantic about the thought of all the apartments that aren't for sale."

The real estate agent nods. Estelle takes several deep, happy breaths. She's going to be neighbors with Julia and Ro, in the apartment on the other side of the landing, and she and Julia will be able to swap books in the elevator.

The first one Estelle is going to give her is by her favorite poet. She'll fold down the corner of one page, underline some of the finest words she knows.

Nothing must happen to you

No, what am I saying

Everything must happen to you

And it must be wonderful Julia will give Estelle a completely different type of literature in exchange. A guidebook about Stockholm.

Ro will lose her dad, she'll visit him every week, he's still on Earth but already belongs to Heaven. Ro's mom will find the strength to cope with the loss because another man will show her that life goes on. Julia will give birth to him with her hand clasped so tightly around Ro's fingers that the nurses have to give both mothers painkillers, one before the birth, the other after.

Ro will sleep beside him, perfectly still, on white sheets, without feeling afraid. Because she would have crossed mountains for his sake, would have done anything. Robbed banks, if necessary. They're going to be good parents, Ro and Julia. Good enough, anyway.

Julia will still hide candies, and Ro will be allowed to keep her birds. The monkey and the frog will love them, visit them every day, and even when Julia offers them lots of money, they won't leave the cage open. Julia and Ro will argue, then make up, and all you have to do is make sure you're better at the latter than the former.

So they will shout loudly and laugh even louder, and when they make up, the walls will shake and Estelle will feel embarrassed in her closet. Their love will continue to be a flower shop.

Outside the police station Zara skips quickly down the steps to the street, afraid that someone else might try to hug her. Lennart hurries after her.

“Would you like to share a taxi?” he asks, as if that weren't the very definition of anarchy.

Zara looks like she's never shared a taxi in her life, or anything else for a very long time. But after a long pause she mutters, "If we do, you can sit in the front. And we're not going in a car with lots of crap dangling from the rearview mirror. That's an evolutionary dead end."

Anna-Lena is still sitting on the steps. Roger sits down beside her with an effort, just close enough that they're almost touching. Anna-Lena stretches out her fingers toward his.

She wants to say sorry. So does he. It's a harder word than you might think, when you've been climbing trees for so long.

She looks up at the sky, dark now, December is merciless. But she knows that IKEA is still open. A light out there, somewhere.

“We could go and look at that countertop you were talking about,” she whispers.

She crumbles when he shakes his head. Roger says nothing for a long time. He keeps changing his mind.

“I thought perhaps we could do something else,” he eventually mumbles.

“What do you mean?”

“The cinema. Maybe. If you'd like that.”

It's a good thing Anna-Lena is already sitting down, because otherwise she would have had to.

They go and see something made up. Because people need stories, too, sometimes. In the darkness of the auditorium they hold hands. For Anna-Lena it feels like coming home, and for Roger, like being good enough.

Estelle hurries back to her apartment. On the way she calls her daughter and tells her not to worry, either about the hostage drama or the fact that her mom lives alone in that large apartment. Because she doesn't anymore. Estelle will have to give up smoking, because the young woman who's going to be renting a room in the apartment won't even let her smoke in the closet.

If we're being pedantic, the young woman actually rents the whole apartment from Estelle's daughter, and then Estelle rents a room from her for the same amount: six thousand five hundred. On the door of the fridge hangs a crumpled drawing of a monkey and a frog and an elk. Estelle stole it from the interview room when Jim was getting coffee. Each morning, every other week, the monkey and the frog will eat breakfast with their mom in Estelle's kitchen. For many years, on the last night of the year, they will watch fireworks together from the window. Then, eventually, a night will come which will be Estelle's last night without Knut, and everyone else's last night with Estelle.

At her funeral Ro will suggest an inscription for her headstone: “Here lies Estelle. She certainly liked her wine!” Julia will kick Ro on the shin, but not hard. Their son will hold each of them by the hand as they walk away. Julia keeps the old woman's books for the rest of her life, the wine bottles, too. When the monkey and the frog grow into teenagers, they smoke in secret in the closet.

Somewhere, in some sort of Heaven, Estelle will be listening to music with one man and talking about literature with another. She's earned that.

Oh, yes. In the basement storage area of an apartment block not far from there, where a mother of two little girls who became a bank robber once slept, alone and frightened, there's still a box of blankets there the day after the hostage drama. Somewhere else entirely a bank doesn't get robbed the day after New Year, because the person who hid their pistol down there under the blankets turns the whole storage area upside down, shouting and swearing because it's gone. Because what sort of callous bastard would steal a person's pistol?

Idiots. he windowsill outside the office is weighed down by snow. The psychologist is talking to her dad on the phone. “Darling Nadia, my little bird,” he says in the language of his homeland, because “bird” is a more beautiful word there. “I love you, too, Dad,” Nadia says patiently. He never used to talk to her like that, but late in life even computer programmers become poets. Nadia assures him over and over that she'll drive carefully when she sets off to visit him the following day, but he'd still prefer to come and fetch her. Dads are dads and daughters are daughters, and not even psychologists can quite come to terms with that.

Nadia hangs up. There's a knock on the door, like when someone who doesn't want to touch the door taps on it with the end of an umbrella. Zara is standing outside. She's holding a letter in her hand.

“Hello? Sorry, I thought... have we got an appointment booked for now?” Nadia wonders, fumbling first for her diary, then for her mobile to see what time it is.

“No, I just...,” Zara replies quietly. A gentle tremble of the metal spokes of the umbrella gives her away. Nadia spots it.

“Come in, come in,” she says anxiously.

The skin under Zara's eyes is full of tiny cracks, worn down by everything it's had to hold back, finally on the brink of bursting. She looks at the picture of the woman on the bridge for several minutes before she asks Nadia: “Do you like your job?”

“Yes,” Nadia nods, unsettled.

“Are you happy?”

Nadia wants to reach out and touch her, but refrains.

“Yes, I'm happy, Zara. Not all the time, but I've learned that you don't have to be happy all the time. But I'm happy… enough. Is that what you came here to ask?”

Zara looks past her.

“You asked me once why I like my job, and I said it was because I was good at it. But I unexpectedly found myself with some time to think recently, and I think I liked my job because I believed in it.”

“How do you mean?” the psychologist asks, in her professional voice, despite the fact that she feels like saying, unprofessionally, that she's really pleased to see Zara. That she's been thinking about her a lot. And has been worrying about what she might do.

Zara reaches out her hand, as close to the picture as possible without actually touching the woman.

“I believe in the place of banks in society. I believe in order. I've never had any objection to the fact that our customers and the media and politicians all hate us, that's our purpose. Banks need to be the ballast in the system. They make it slow, bureaucratic, difficult to maneuver. To stop the world lurching about too much. People need bureaucracy, to give them time to think before they do something stupid.”

She falls silent. The psychologist sits down quietly on her chair.

“Forgive me for speculating, Zara, but... it sounds like something's changed. In you.”

Zara looks her straight in the eye then, for the first time.

“The housing market is going to crash again. Maybe not tomorrow, but it's going to crash again. We know that.

Yet we still lend money. When people lose everything, we tell them it was their responsibility, that those are the rules of the game, that it was their own fault they were so greedy. But of course that isn't true. Most people aren't greedy, most people are just... like you said when we were talking about the picture: they're just looking for something to cling on to. Something to fight for.

They want somewhere to live, somewhere to raise their children, live their lives.”

“Has anything happened to you since we last met?” the psychologist asks.

Zara gives her a troubled smile. Because how do you answer that? So instead she answers a question that's never been asked: "Everything's become lighter, easier, Nadia. The banks aren't ballast anymore.

One hundred years ago practically everyone who worked in a bank understood how the bank made money. Now there are at most three people in each bank who really understand where it all comes from."

“And you're questioning your place there now, because you no longer think you understand?” the psychologist guesses.

Zara's chin moves sadly from side to side.

“No. I've handed in my notice. Because I realized that I was one of the three.”

“What are you going to do from now on?”

“I don't know.”

The psychologist finally has something important to say. Something she didn't learn at college but knows that everyone needs to hear, every so often.

"Not knowing is a good place to start."

Zara doesn't say anything more. She massages her hands, counts windows. The desk is narrow, the two women probably wouldn't have felt comfortable sitting so close to each other if it hadn't been there between them.

Sometimes we don't need distance, just barriers. Zara's movements are wary, Nadia's cautious. Only after a long time has passed does the psychologist venture to speak again.

“Do you remember asking me, one of the first times we met, if I could explain what panic attacks were? I don't think I ever gave you a good answer.”

“Have you got a better one now?” Zara asks.

The psychologist shakes her head. Zara can't help smiling. Then Nadia says, as herself, in her own words rather than those of her psychology training or anyone else: “But you know what, Zara? I've learned that it helps to talk about it. Unfortunately I think most people would still get more sympathy from their colleagues and bosses at work if they show up looking rough one morning and say 'I'm hungover' than if they say 'I'm suffering from anxiety.' But I think we pass people in the street every day who feel the same as you and I, many of them just don't know what it is. Men and women going around for months having trouble breathing and seeing doctor after doctor because they think there's something wrong with their lungs. All because it's so damn difficult to admit that something else is... broken. That it's an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest. Our brains are lying to us, telling us we're going to die. But there's nothing wrong with our lungs, Zara. We're not going to die, you and I."

The words drift around between them, dancing invisibly on their retinas before the silence takes them. We're not going to die. We're not going to die. We're not going to die, you and I.

“Yet!” Zara eventually points out, and the psychologist bursts out laughing.

“Do you know what, Zara? Maybe you could get a new job writing mottos for fortune cookies?” She smiles.

“The only note a cake eater needs to find is 'this is why you're fat'...,” Zara replies. Then she laughs, too, but the quivering tip of her nose gives her away. Her gaze darts first through the window, then it sneaks back to glance at Nadia's hands, then her neck, then her chin, never quite up to her eyes, but almost. The silence that follows is the longest they've shared.

Zara closes her eyes, presses her lips together, and the skin beneath her eyes finally gives way. Her terror forms itself into fragile drops and sets off toward the edge of the desk.

Very slowly she lets the envelope slip out of her hand. The psychologist picks it up hesitantly. Zara wants to whisper that it was because of the letter that she came here, that very first time, when exactly ten years had passed since the man jumped. That she needs someone to read out loud what he wrote to her, and then, when her chest has caught fire, stop her from jumping herself.

She wants to whisper the whole thing, about the bridge and about Nadia, and how Zara watched as the boy came running over and saved her. And how she has spent every single day since then thinking about the difference between people. But all she manages to say is: “Nadia... you... I...”

Nadia feels like embracing the older woman on the other side of the desk, hugging her, but she doesn't dare. So instead, while Zara keeps her eyes closed, the psychologist gently slips her little finger beneath the back of the envelope and opens it. She pulls out a ten-year-old handwritten note. Four words.

The bridge is covered with ice, sparkling beneath the last few valiant stars as dawn heaves its way over the horizon. The town is breathing deeply around it, still asleep, swaddled in eiderdowns and dreams and tiny feet belonging to hearts our own can't beat without.

Zara is standing by the railing. She leans forward, looks over the edge. It almost looks, just for a single, solitary moment, as if she's going to jump. But if anyone had seen her, had known the whole of her story and everything that had happened in the past few days... well, then of course it would have been obvious that she wasn't going to do that. No one goes through all this just to end a story that way. She isn't the sort who jumps.

And then?

Then she lets go.

The drop is further than you realize, even if you've just been standing up there. It takes longer than you think to hit the surface. A gentle scraping sound, wind seizing hold of paper, the fluttering and crumpling as the letter drifts out across the water. The fingertips that have held that envelope ten thousand times since they first picked it up from the doormat give up their struggle and let the letter sail off toward its own eternity.

The man who sent it to her ten years ago wrote down everything he thought she needed to know. It was the last thing he ever told anyone. Only four words in length, no more than that. The four biggest little words one person, anyone at all, can say to another:

It wasn't your fault.

By the time the letter hits the water Zara is already walking away, toward the far side of the bridge. There's a car parked there, waiting for her. Lennart is sitting inside it. Their eyes meet when she opens the door.

He lets her put the music on as loud as she wants. She's planning to do her absolute utmost to get tired of him.

Hey say that a person's personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn't true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we'd never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we're more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

The girl always thought that the weirdest thing was that she could never be angry with her mom. The glass surrounding that feeling was impossible to break. After the funeral she did the cleaning, pulling empty gin bottles from all the hiding places she never had the heart to tell her mom she already knew about. Perhaps that's the last lifeline an addicted parent clings to, the idea that their child probably doesn't know. As if the chaos could possibly be hidden. It can't even be buried, the daughter thought, it just gets handed down.

Once her mom slurred in her ear: “Personality is just the sum of our experiences. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. So don't you worry, my little princess, you won't get your heart broken because you come from a broken home.

You won't grow up to be a romantic, because children from broken homes don't believe in everlasting love.” She fell asleep on her daughter's shoulder on the sofa, and her daughter covered her with a blanket and wiped the spilled gin from the floor. “You're wrong, Mom,” she whispered in the darkness, and she was right. No one robs a bank for their children's sake unless they're a romantic.

Because the girl grew up and had girls of her own. One monkey, one frog. She tried to be a good mom, even though she didn't have an instruction manual. A good wife, a good employee, a good person. She was terrified of failing every second of every day, but she did genuinely believe that everything was going well for a while. Fairly well, anyway. She relaxed, she wasn't prepared, so infidelity and divorce hit her hard in the back of the head.

Life knocked her flat. That happens to most of us at some point. Maybe you, too.

A few weeks ago, on the way home from school, the elk and the monkey and the frog all got off the bus as usual and started to walk across the bridge. Halfway across the girls stopped, their mom didn't notice at first, and when she looked back they were ten yards behind her. The monkey and the frog had bought a padlock, they'd seen people attaching them to the railings of bridges in other towns on the Internet. "If you do that, you lock the love in forever and then you never stop loving each other!"

Their mom felt crushed, because she thought the girls were worried she was going to stop loving them after the divorce. That everything was going to be different now, that she'd stop being theirs. It took ten minutes of sobbing and confused explanations before the monkey and the frog patiently cupped their mom's cheeks in their hands and whispered: "We're not worried about losing you, Mom. We just want you to know that you're never going to lose us."

The lock clicked as they fixed it in place. The monkey threw the key over the railing and it spun down toward the water, and all three of them cried. “Forever,” the mom whispered. “Forever,” the girls repeated. As they were walking away the youngest daughter admitted that when she first saw that thing about the padlocks online, she thought they were doing it because they were worried someone might steal the bridge. Then she wondered if they might be worried that someone was going to steal the padlock.

Her big sister had to explain it to her, but managed to do so without making her little sister feel stupid. Their mom couldn't help thinking that she and their dad had at least gotten something right, because the girls were capable of admitting when they were wrong, and of forgiving others when they got things wrong.

They had pizza that evening, the girls' favorite. When they'd fallen asleep on their mattresses on the floor of the little apartment that cost six thousand five hundred a month, and which she at that particular moment had no idea how she was going to pay the next month's rent on, the mom sat up on her own in the darkness. It wasn't long to Christmas, then it would be New Year, she knew how much the girls were looking forward to the fireworks. It was tearing her apart that they still trusted her, unaware of how many things she'd failed at. When dawn came she packed their backpacks, and a notebook fell out of her eldest daughter's. She was about to put it back, but it fell open at a page that began with the words: "The Princess with Two Kingdoms." At first the mom felt annoyed, because she had spent their whole lives trying to persuade her daughters not to want to be princesses—she hoped they'd want to be warriors. And because the girls loved their mom, of course they did as she wanted, or at least pretended to, then did the exact opposite, because it's the duty of children not to pay the slightest bit of attention to their parents.

The eldest daughter had been told to write a fairy tale of her own for school, so she wrote "The Princess with Two Kingdoms." It was about a princess who lived in a big, beautiful castle, and one night the princess found a hole in the floor under her bed, and down inside the hole was a secret, magical world full of strange, fantastical creatures, dragons and trolls and other things her daughter must have thought up herself. Things so fantastical that the imagination and flight from reality that lay behind them crushed the mother, because all she kept thinking was: How terrible must your real life feel to require this much... escape? All the creatures were happy, they lived in peace, and there was no pain in their little world. But the princess in the story soon uncovered a terrible truth: that the magical realm she had found, where all her new friends lived, was actually located between two castles in two different kingdoms.

One of them was ruled by a king, the other by a queen, and they were fighting a horrible war against each other. They sent their armies to fight and fire terrible weapons, but the walls of both kingdoms were too tall and strong to give way, and in the end the girl realized that the war wasn't going to destroy either of them. It would just ruin and kill everything that lay between them. And that was when she learned the truth: that the king and queen were her parents.

She was their princess, and the entire war was about her, they were each trying to beat the other with the sole aim of winning her back. When the mom read the last words of the story, her daughters were just starting to wake up on their mattresses, and everything that was worth anything inside her shattered. The story ended with the princess saying good-bye to all her new friends and setting off, alone. She disappeared into the darkness one night and never came back again. Because she knew that if she disappeared, there would be nothing left to fight over. That way she would be able to save both kingdoms and the realm in between.

When her daughters had gotten up, the mom had breakfast with them, trying to act as if nothing were wrong. She dropped them off at school, then walked all the way back, out onto the bridge, and stood there in the middle of it, holding on to the padlock as tightly as she could.

She didn't fight her ex-husband for her old home, she didn't argue with her former boss about her job, she didn't clash with their lawyer, didn't fire any weapons, didn't cause chaos. For the sake of the children. She did all she could to prevent any of the adults' mistakes from affecting them.

That doesn't explain why she tried to rob a bank. It doesn't excuse it. But maybe you've had the occasional really bad idea, too. Maybe you deserved a second chance. Maybe you're not alone in that.

On the morning of the day before New Year's Eve she left home with a pistol. That same evening, right now, she is walking back. A few hours after the hostage drama that the town will be talking about for many, many years to come, the mom picks up her daughters and asks: "Have you had a nice time at Dad's?"

“Yes, Mom! How about you?” the youngest daughter asks.

The mom smiles, thinks for a moment, then shrugs: “Oh, you know... nothing much has happened. Everything's been the same as usual.”

But as they cross the bridge the mom puts one hand gently on her eldest daughter's shoulder and whispers quickly into her ear: "You're my princess, and my warrior, you can be both at the same time—promise me that you'll never forget that. I know I'm not always such a great mom, but the fact that your dad and I are getting divorced isn't you... you must never think, even for a single second that this is... your..." The eldest daughter nods, blinking away tears. The younger calls to them to hurry up and they run after her, their mom wipes her face and asks if they'd like pizza for supper, and the younger one cries out: "Do bears poop in the woods, or what?!"

Just after they fall asleep that night, in their mom's new home in the apartment of a kind and just-crazy-enough old lady called Estelle, the eldest daughter takes hold of her mom's hand and whispers: "You're a good mom, Mom. Don't worry so much. It's okay."

And there they find it, at last: peace for the realm between the two kingdoms. All the magical, wonderful, made-up creatures can sleep safe and sound. Monkeys, frogs, elks, old ladies, everyone.

The new year arrives, which of course never means as much as you hope unless you happen to sell calendars. One day becomes another, now becomes then. Winter spreads out across the town like a relative with slightly too much self-confidence, the building on the other side of the road from the bank changes color in line with the temperature.

It doesn't look like much, of course, a gray building under its temporary white covering in a place where no one seems to choose to live but merely tolerates being stored. In a few years no doubt one of the locals will point to the door and tell some smug visitor from one of the big cities: "There was a hostage drama in there once." The visitor will peer at the building and snort: "In there? Yeah, right!" Because things like that don't happen in a town like this, everyone knows that.

It's a few days after New Year, and a woman is coming out of the door. She's laughing, her two daughters are with her, and they've just said something that's made them all laugh so hard that their noses are dripping amid the swirling snowflakes. They walk to the trash bin and dispose of a pizza box, then the woman suddenly looks up and stops mid-stride. One of her daughters starts to climb up her while the other one bounces up and down.

It's getting late, the sky is January black and the falling snow is obscuring visibility, but she sees the police car on the other side of the street. Inside it are an older and a younger police officer. She stares at them, her daughters haven't noticed her terror yet.

All she can think is: Not in front of the girls. This takes a matter of seconds, but she manages to live two lifetimes. Theirs.

Then the police car rolls slowly toward her.

Past her. _ _ _ _

It drives on, turns right, disappears.

“I'd understand if you want to bring her in,” Jim says quietly in the passenger seat, worried that his son's changed his mind.

“No, I just wanted to see her, so there were two of us in this,” his son says behind the wheel.

“Two of us in what?”

“Letting her go.”

They don't say any more about her. Either the woman outside the building or the one they both miss. Jim saved a bank robber and deceived his son, and Jack might perhaps never quite be able to forgive him for that, but it's possible for them both to move on together despite that.

They drive through their town for several minutes until the father eventually says, without looking at his son: “I know you've been offered a job in Stockholm.”

Jack looks at him in surprise.

“How the hell did you hear that?”

“I'm not stupid, you know. Not all the time, anyway. Sometimes I just seem stupid.”

Jack smiles shamefacedly.

“I know, Dad.”

"You ought to take it. The job."

Jack signals, turns, takes plenty of time to come up with a reply.

“Take a job in Stockholm? Do you know how much it costs to live there?”

His dad taps the plastic door of the glove compartment sadly with his wedding ring.

“Don't stay here for my sake, son.”

“I'm not,” Jack lies.

Because he knows that if his mom had been there, she'd have said, you know what, son? There are worse reasons to stay somewhere.

“Our shift's over,” Jim notes.

"Would you like coffee?" Jack asks.

“Now? It's a bit late,” his dad yawns.

“Let's stop and get coffee,” Jack insists.

“What for?”

“I thought we could pick my car up from the station and go for a drive.”

“Where to?”

Jack makes his answer sound obvious.

“To see my sister.”

At that, Jim's eyes lose their focus on his son and slide off toward the road.

“What? Now?”

“Yes.”

"Why... why now?"

“It'll soon be her birthday. It'll soon be your birthday. There are only eleven months to go before Christmas. Does it make any damn difference why? I just thought she might like to come home.”

Jim has to stay focused on the road, the white line running along the middle of it, to keep his voice under control.

“That's at least a twenty-four-hour drive, though?”

Jack rolls his eyes.

“What the hell, Dad? I said we'd stop for coffee!”

So that's what they do. They drive all night and all the following day. Knock on her door. Maybe she'll go home with them, maybe she won't. Maybe she's ready to find a better way down, maybe she now knows the difference between how it feels to fly and how it feels to fall, maybe she doesn't. That sort of thing's impossible to control, just like love. Because perhaps it's true what they say, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and uncontrollably for one simple reason: you're theirs. Your parents and siblings can love you for the rest of your life, too, for precisely the same reason.

The truth. There isn't any. All we've managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn't got any, and all we know about God is that we don't know anything. So the only thing a mom who was a priest demanded of her family was simple: that we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.

We save those we can.

Spring arrives. It always finds us, in the end. The wind sweeps winter away, the trees rustle and birds start making a fuss, and nature suddenly crashes through with a deafening roar where the snow has swallowed every echo for months.

Jack gets out of an elevator, bewildered and curious. He's clutching a letter in his hand. It landed on his doormat one morning, without a stamp. Inside was a note with this address on it, as well as the floor of the building and office number. Beneath that was a photograph of the bridge and another envelope, sealed, with another name written on it.

Zara saw Jack at the police station and recognized him, in spite of the years that had passed. And because she's been living those same moments over and over again since then, she realized that he's been doing the same.

Jack finds the right office, knocks on the door. Ten years have passed since a man jumped, almost exactly the same amount of time since a young woman didn't. She opens the door without knowing who he is, but his heart turns to confetti the moment he sees her, because he hasn't forgotten. He hasn't seen her since she was standing on the railing of the bridge, but he would still have recognized her, even in darkness.

“I... I...,” Jack stammers.

“Hello? Are you looking for someone?” Nadia wonders, friendly but bemused.

He has to reach out for the doorframe, and her fingertips brush his. They don't yet know how they're capable of affecting each other. He hands her the large envelope, with his name written untidily on the front, and inside it are the photograph of the bridge and the address of her office. Beneath those are the smaller envelope with For Nadia written on the outside. Inside is a small note, on which Zara had written, in considerably neater handwriting, nine simple words.

——

You saved yourself. He just happened to be there.

When Nadia loses her balance, just for a moment, Jack catches hold of her arm. Their eyes dance around each other. She clings tightly, tightly, tightly to those nine words, but barely manages to formulate any of her own: “It was you... on the bridge, when I... was that you?”

He nods mutely. She fumbles for more words.

“I don't know what to… just give me a moment. I need to… I need to compose myself.”

She walks to her desk and sinks onto the chair. She's spent ten years wondering who he was, and now she has no idea what to say. Where to start. Jack walks cautiously into the office after her, sees the photograph on the bookcase, the one Zara always adjusted when she was there. It's a picture of Nadia and a group of children, at a big summer camp six months before.

Nadia and the children are laughing and joking, and they're all wearing matching T-shirts bearing the name of the charitable organization that funded the camp. It collects money to work with children like the ones in the picture, all of whom have lost a family member to suicide. It helps to know that you're not alone when you've been left behind. You can't carry the guilt and the shame and the unbearable silence on your own, and you shouldn't have to, that's why Nadia goes to the summer camp each year. To listen a lot, talk a little, and laugh as much as possible.

She doesn't know it yet, but the charity has just received a donation to its bank account. From a woman with headphones who has resigned from her job, given away her fortune, and crossed a bridge. They'll be able to hold those summer camps for many years to come.

Jack and Nadia sit on either side of the narrow desk, looking at each other. He smiles weakly, and after a while she does the same, simultaneously terrified and full of laughter. One day, in ten years' time, perhaps they'll tell someone that was how it felt. The first time. he truth? The truth about all this? The truth is that this was a story about many different things, but most of all about idiots. Because we're doing the best we can, we really are. We're trying to be grown-up and love each other and understand how the hell you're supposed to insert U.S.B leads. We're looking for something to cling on to, something to fight for, something to look forward to. We're doing all we can to teach our children how to swim. We have all of this in common, yet most of us remain strangers, we never know what we do to each other, how your life is affected by mine.

Perhaps we hurried past each other in a crowd today, and neither of us noticed, and the fibers of your coat brushed against mine for a single moment and then we were gone. I don't know who you are.

But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well.

There'll be another one along tomorrow.

If You Need Someone

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:

Call 800-273-8255

Crisis Text Line:

Text “talk” to 741741

For information and support, whether it's you yourself who needs it or someone close to you, take a look at:

zerosuicide dot com sprc dot org

Author's Thanks

J. Very few people have had the effect on my life that you have. The kindest, strangest, funniest, messiest, most complicated friend I've ever had. Almost twenty years have passed now, and I still think about you almost every day.

I'm so sorry you couldn't bear it any longer. I hate myself for not being able to save you.

Neda. Twelve years together, ten years married, two children, and a million rows about wet towels on the floor and feelings we're still trying to find words for. I don't know how you've managed to juggle two careers, yours and mine, but without you I wouldn't be standing here now. I know I drive you crazy, but I'm crazy about you. Ducks fly together.

The monkey and the frog. I'm trying to be a good dad. I really am. But when you jumped in the car and asked, "What's that smell? Are you eating candy?" I lied. Sorry.

Niklas Natt och Dag. I don't know how many years we've been sharing an office. Eight? Nine? I can honestly say I've never known a genius, but you are the closest I've come. I've never had a brother, either.

Riad Haddouche, Junes Jaddid, and Erik Edlund. I don't say it as often as I should. But I hope you know.

Mum and Dad, my sister, and Paul. Houshang, Parham, and Meri.

Vanja Vinter. Stubborn as hell since 2013, and the only person who's worked with me throughout almost all my career. Editor, proofreader, extra pair of eyes, a whirlwind, and a really good friend for all of my stories. Thank you for always giving one hundred percent.

The Salomonsson Agency. Most of all, of course, my agent Tor Jonasson, who doesn't always understand what the hell I'm playing at but always defends me just as doggedly. Marie Gyllenhammar, who has been like an extra member of the family when the machinery and circus spin too fast and I'm trying to find myself. Cecilia Imberg, who acted as an extra proofreader and linguistic adviser toward the end of this project. (In those instances where we disagreed about grammar, obviously you were right, but sometimes I make mistakes just for the hell of it.)

Bokförlaget Forum, my publishers in Sweden. In particular John Häggblom, Maria Burlin, Adam Dahlin, and Sara Lindegren.

Alex Schulman, who, when I was trying to make this book work, reminded me how it can feel when a text completely floors you. Christoffer Carlsson, who read and corrected and laughed. I owe you a beer. Maybe two. Marcus Leifby, my absolute first choice when I need to drink coffee and talk about Division 2 ice hockey and Vietnam War documentaries for six hours on a Tuesday.

All the publishers in other countries who publish my books, from Scandinavia to South Korea. In particular, I'd like to thank Peter Borland, Libby McGuire, Kevin Hanson, Ariele Fredman, Rita Silva, and everyone else who has stubbornly continued to have faith in me over at Atria Books/Simon & Schuster in the U.S.A and Canada, and Judith Curr, who helped me to get there. You've become my second-home market.

Everyone who has translated my books, in particular Neil Smith. My cover designer, Nils Olsson. My favorite bookseller, Johan Zillén.

The psychologists and therapists who have worked with me in recent years. In particular, Bengt, who helped me get to grips with my panic attacks.

You. For reading this. Thank you for your time.

Finally: the authors Estelle refers to at various points in this story. In order of appearance, they are: Astrid Lindgren (page 248), J. M. Barrie (page 248), Charles Dickens (page 258), Joyce Carol Oates (page 258), Kahlil Gibran (page 259), William Shakespeare (page 281), Leo Tolstoy (page 304), and Bodil Malmsten (pages 305 and 313). If any of them has been misquoted, the fault is mine alone, or possibly my translator's, but certainly not Estelle's.

More from the Author

About the Author

Fredrik Bakman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, Us Against You, and two novellas, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and The Deal of a Lifetime, as well as one work of nonfiction, Things My Son Needs to Know about the World. His books are published in more than forty countries. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Facebook and Twitter @BackmanLand and on Instagram @Backmansk.

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Also by Fredrik Backman

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A Man Called Ove

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

Britt-Marie Was Here

And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

Beartown

The Deal of a Lifetime

Us Against You

Things My Son Needs to Know About the World

The Deal of a Lifetime

And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and...

Us Against You

Beartown

Britt-Marie Was Here

Nonfiction

Things My Son Needs to Know about the World

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2019 by Fredrik Backman

Translation copyright 2020 by Neil Smith

Originally published in Sweden in 2019 as Folk med Angest Published by arrangement with Salomonsson Agency

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I.S.B.N 978-1-5011-6083-7 I.S.B.N 978-1-5011-6085-1 (ebook)