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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 fiancé e 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 fiancé e 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? ”

“Yes. ”

“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 pursed 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. ”

“Oh! ” 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 everydays 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? ”

Estelle nodded.

“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? ”

“No. ”

“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.

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