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.

52

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!”