The Key – Part 1: The Agreement

The key lay on the kitchen table between the salt cellar and the fruit bowl, small and bright, on a thin silver chain.

Tobias looked at it for a long time. He was forty, a structural engineer, a man whose whole working life was calculation and margins of safety. Marlowe was forty-three, a criminal barrister, patient and exact, with a way of waiting that had once reduced a hostile witness to silence. They had been together nine years.

Three weeks earlier, in the dark, he had told her what he wanted: to give her the key. To be denied, deliberately, completely, for a week, and to be answerable to her for every hour of it. He had expected her to laugh. She had asked him four hundred questions.

"The terms," said Marlowe, and slid a sheet of paper across the table.

She had written them as she wrote an agreement. A week, no longer, ending on Sunday at six in the evening. The device, a lightweight steel cage, medical in design, had been fitted at the start, and he had worn it for a full test day beforehand. There was a second, spare key in a sealed envelope in the bathroom cabinet, labelled with the word Daylight. "If you need out, for any reason, for pain, for worry, for nothing, you open the envelope. I will never ask you why, and I will never be disappointed. Is that clear?"

"Yes."

"The other rule is conversation. Every evening at nine, ten minutes, no matter what. How you are. What you need. If I am being unfair. Honest answers only."

"Yes, Marlowe."

"Yes, what?"

He smiled, a little shakily. "Yes, Mistress."

"Better." She lifted the key on its chain and let it swing. "I will wear it. You will see it every day. You will not touch it, and you will not ask for it, except to tell me you are in trouble."

"I understand."

"Are you content?" she asked, quietly.

"Content, Mistress."

"Good." She slipped the chain over her head and tucked the key inside her blouse. It sat against her collarbone, a small cold gleam. "Then the week begins."

The first day was simple, and almost easy. He went to work. He came home. He found, on the hall table, a handwritten list of duties for the evening, and he did each one in order, and she watched him do them over the rim of a glass of wine, saying nothing. At nine they sat on the sofa and talked, as promised, for exactly ten minutes. He was fine. She was kind. She touched his cheek and went to bed alone.

On the second day the waiting began to have a texture.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Seven Days.