Bunny sexually assaults Sabrina Cantrell

Bunny’s assault of Sabrina Cantrell turns a visit to help a new mother into a defining breach of trust in the Munro household. Recalled later as an early marital betrayal, the incident links Bunny’s sudden sexual compulsion to Libby Munro’s shock and to consequences he regards as beyond his control.

The Visit and Assault

Sabrina Cantrell, Libby Munro’s workmate and oldest friend, visits while Libby is nursing the baby in the living room. In the kitchenette, Sabrina makes tea for the exhausted new mother. Bunny offers to help, then unexpectedly gropes Sabrina. The narration presents his act as an abrupt compulsion: even as he does it, he wonders what he is doing. The account does not soften the violation by treating it as a deliberate courtship or a mutual encounter.

Disclosure and Confrontation

Sabrina later telephones Libby and tells her that Bunny groped her in the kitchen. Libby confronts him while holding the baby and the telephone, asking whether the report is true. Bunny does not answer; he lowers his head and looks at the checkerboard linoleum in the kitchenette. Libby’s sobbed question about why he did it leaves the act’s motive unresolved, while making its immediate cost within the marriage unmistakable.

Aftermath and Retrospective Meaning

The assault sets off what the narration describes as weeks of shock waves through the household. Bunny later thinks of it as his first marital miscalculation, returning in memory not only to the breach itself but to Sabrina’s visit and the chain of consequences it began. His retrospective framing stresses the gap between the suddenness he attributes to his compulsion and the lasting harm that follows: he may describe the act as beyond his control, but Libby and Sabrina bear its consequences.