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Fiona’s ex-husband’s wealth lapping over him with the breeze and the sound of the water. Then Larry, the younger daughter, had appeared beside his chair, clutching something long and furred at her chest.
    â€˜Oh!’ he’d said, making a child-greeting smile. ‘Hello!’
    His voice was awkward; he had not been ready for this. And then he saw that the column of fur was a live rabbit. Larry held the creature under its forelegs, elbows at her sides, her fingers meeting as she clasped it, as if it were a posy of flowers.
    Stephen yelped. Larry and the rabbit both stared at him in silence. He watched the rabbit’s glazed gaze from its brown eyes, its long body dangling down the little girl’s front. It didn’t struggle or shiver, merely hung there, resigned, its soft, pouchy skin bunching up around its neck. Was Stephen supposed to do something? He leaned back, away from its fur. Larry just stared, her jaw set, blinking now and then in the sun. He heard himself babble. ‘What a lovely rabbit! Is it yours?’
    She said nothing, but moved her jaw to one side, then nodded. She shifted a little, hitching the rabbit up as though it were a piece of clothing.
    â€˜What’s its name?’ Stephen was worried now, not about his allergy but about the rabbit. Perhaps it was going into some sort of catatonic trauma, its blood supply halted. It hung, like a pelt.
    Larry stared at him with her slightly bulging, wide blue eyes, and looked as if she might cry. She said, in a low, gravelly voice: ‘Fluffy.’
    â€˜Hello, Fluffy!’ Stephen said, hearing his woodenness. ‘Do you think he might like to go back to his cage now?’ He looked around for Fiona, but she was nowhere to be seen.
    Larry shook her head. ‘Oh,’ said Stephen. ‘It’s a girl,’ croaked Larry.
    â€˜Ah,’ Stephen said. He swallowed. The rabbit swallowed too. Then Larry whirled and ran off down the side of the house, the rabbit’s body stretching and bouncing softly as she ran, the breeze billowing her little purple dress.
    Stephen had slumped in his chair, a simmer of unease beginning in him. What was he doing there anyway? Fiona was his ex-brother-in-law’s sister; could there be a more tangled and foolish thing to consider, than what he was considering?
    There had been something erotic about it from the start, all those years ago when they danced together at Mandy and Chris’s wedding, and snuck out to share a line of speed Fiona had brought. At the end of the evening they took another bottle of wine from the ice crate and drank it on the back steps of Stephen’s parents’ house, talking and laughing and smoking furiously till dawn. Nothing had happened between them, but whenever the memory returned his gut had fizzed with recalled anticipation. After the wedding, on the three or four times they met over the years there had been a fond, enthusiastic embrace, a lively clinking of glasses.
    But well over a decade then passed without them seeing each other, and in that time Mandy and Chris divorced, Chris had remarried. Fiona had long finished uni, become a physiotherapist at one of the big teaching hospitals, married and then unmarried a barrister. And had two kids.
    They had met again by accident at the zoo kiosk counter, the little girls behind her at one of the iron tables, stuffing chips into themselves. The promising warmth in Fiona’s eyes across the counter, the instant flirtatious revival of the possibility that had always been there, made him catch his breath. He’d watched her stride back to her bag on the table for a pen, observed her as she bent over the counter to write down his phone number. He found he wanted to bury his fingers in the thick sandy scruff of her short, surfie-boy’s hair. He wanted to touch the fine sheen of sweat on her brow. As she bent to write and the neckline of her blue cotton sundress fell open, he saw the soft cleft