The key was in her coat pocket, where it had been for six weeks.
She should have given it back. The arrangement had technically concluded — he had said so, or nearly said so, in the careful language they had developed for the careful thing they were doing — and yet she had not given back the key. She had not even pretended to try. It had moved from her coat pocket to her bag to her desk drawer and then, because the desk drawer felt like a location too accessible to her own oversight, back into her coat pocket, where it sat with the weight of a much larger object.
On a Tuesday in March she had two hours between a morning meeting and an afternoon one, and the afternoon meeting was on the other side of the city from her office, and the apartment was roughly between the two, and the route she would normally take did not pass it but a slightly longer route would.
She took the longer route. This was the first decision.
His name was Marc. They had met at a function two years ago — some professional dinner at a venue with very good wine and inadequate lighting — and had spoken for long enough that the quality of the conversation had created a specific kind of problem, which was the problem of wanting to continue it in a setting where continuation was possible.
The setting had eventually been his apartment. She had a partner; he did not. She had told him about the partner on the third occasion they met, in the manner of providing relevant information rather than as a prohibition, and he had received it in the same manner — as information, neither welcomed nor used against anything. The situation was what it was. They had both known what it was.
The apartment was on the fourth floor of a building on a quiet street in the seventh arrondissement, and it had a small balcony that she had stood on three times in various states of undress and thought about what a strange and specific pleasure it was to be exactly where she was and not where she was supposed to be.
She rang the buzzer. There was a pause and then a click and then the door opened and she climbed four flights of stairs and the door at the top was open.
He was standing in the kitchen. He was in a shirt that suggested he had not been expecting anyone — rolled sleeves, unbuttoned one button further than was usual — and there was coffee on the counter and he was looking at her with an expression she had learned to read accurately over the preceding two years, which was the expression of someone choosing to be unsurprised by a thing that surprised them.
"You have a meeting," he said.
"At three," she said. "It's twelve forty."
A pause. He picked up his coffee. "Do you want coffee?"
"I don't have time for coffee."
He set the cup down.
There is a particular quality to desire that has been deferred too long. It does not arrive tentatively when it finally arrives; it does not announce itself in the measured tones of the thing it replaced. It has the weight of everything it has been while it was waiting. She had been waiting, in various degrees of conscious acknowledgement, for six weeks — ever since the last time, which had also been unplanned, which had also been a matter of a key and a route and a decision she had made before she had decided to make it.
The afternoon light came in at a low angle and made the bedroom the particular colour of an afternoon that is being stolen from a life that does not know it is being stolen from.
At ten past two she was in his bathroom, washing her face with the exactness of someone who needs to be completely presentable in forty-five minutes. The meeting was real; the client was exacting; the presentation she had worked on for three weeks had nothing whatever to do with this apartment or this afternoon or the fact that she was still holding the key.
He was leaning against the doorframe when she came out.
"You should keep it," he said. Without preamble. As if the sentence had been forming in the preceding weeks and this was simply the moment it had decided to become audible.
She looked at him. "Marc."
"I know."
"It complicates things."
"It already complicates things." He said it without pressure. It was an observation about the existing state of affairs, not a request for a change in them. "Keeping it doesn't change that in any direction that matters."
She thought about this. Outside, the city moved in its ordinary afternoon way — traffic, pigeons, the specific sound of Paris at two o'clock on a weekday, which is the sound of a city going about its business with no particular interest in anyone's private arrangements.
"I'll keep it," she said.
He nodded once, as if she had confirmed something he already knew, and stepped back to let her pass.
The meeting went well. The client was satisfied. She sat through forty-five minutes of her own competence and thought, in the intervals between sentences, about the specific quality of afternoon light in an apartment on a quiet street in the seventh arrondissement, and the weight of a key in a coat pocket, and the various ways a person decides what they are and are not willing to know about themselves.
On the way home she took the longer route.
She did not stop.
But she took it.