A few days after Ashley and I finally kissed, she called me in tears. Judy’s cage was soaked with blood.

We rushed her to the vet, where they cut her open, removed several afflicted organs and sewed her up again. While we waited, the vet said that rabbits often did not wake from surgery.

Rabbits don’t like pain, the vet said. Too much stress and they tend to quit.

I found myself feeling envious of rabbits as the vet explained Judy’s fragile physiology. Natural selection hadn’t equipped me with a way to grant myself an easy death. But rabbits, apparently, were adept at having quick heart attacks when under mortal threat. I wondered how Judy would decide: Tough it out or fold?

It was spring. The nights I had imagined with Ashley were not set at Bright Eyes & Bushy Tails Veterinary Hospital, but when Judy finally woke, Ashley’s joy was all-embracing.

The vet, though, did not seem relieved. Judy wasn’t eating and drinking, and until she did, we had to fear a condition called gastrointestinal stasis, in which a rabbit’s digestive system shuts down and the animal slowly bloats to death. I watched Ashley’s face go ashen again and wondered if she really wanted me here for this. Something in me said: “Back away.”

Good relationships, it seemed to me, were based on mutual niceness, a gentle zone where friends and partners lived out their affections. The rabbit had not been especially nice to me, not compared with golden retrievers I had known, and I didn’t feel like being that nice to her, not since she chewed through my MacBook cord. Now the vet was handing me several IV rehydration bags and a mix of mealy food paste we were supposed to force-feed to a rabbit that I doubted even wanted me in her life.