The key was old and brass and slightly bent at the bow, as if it had been carried in a pocket with other heavier things for years. He set it on the blue saucer by the door the third time he came over, the way other men empty their pockets of coins. He did not announce it. He did not say, this is for you. He simply left it there with his loose change, and when he gathered the change the next morning he did not gather the key.
I noticed. Of course I noticed. I am a person who notices saucers. I am a person who, if you leave a book open on my table, will read the page you left it on and then close it before you come back so that you will not know I have read it. The key sat there on the blue dish for the rest of the week, accumulating, somehow, weight. I moved around it. I wiped the small table beneath the saucer and lifted the saucer and replaced it, and did not touch the key.
It was not the key to my apartment. I knew the shape of mine. It was not the key to his, either, or to any building I had ever entered with him. It was a stranger key. It belonged to a door I had never seen, and he had set it down in my home and walked out without it, and the meaning of that gesture was a thing I turned over in my hands at odd hours, the way a child turns over a stone looking for the soft alarmed life beneath.
A woman I know would have asked. She would have held it up between two fingers at dinner and said, what is this, and what am I supposed to do with it. I am not that woman. I have never been that woman. I learned young that to ask is sometimes to be answered, and that an answer can close a door that a question keeps open. So I let the key sit on the blue saucer and I let the question sit in my mouth, and for the rest of that month, whenever he arrived, I watched to see if he would notice that the key was still there. He never did. Or he did, and did not say. I could not tell which, and I did not want to.
One night, late, after he had gone, I picked the key up. It was warm, though it had been sitting in a cold room. I put it in the small drawer where I keep the things I do not throw away and do not look at: a ticket stub, a button, a photograph of a dog I no longer own. I put the key in with these other relics of unfinished sentences, and I closed the drawer, and I went to bed, and I did not dream of doors.
He stopped coming, eventually. People do. The blue saucer is still by the door. The key is still in the drawer. Some afternoons, when the light is right and the apartment is very quiet, I take it out and hold it in my palm and feel the small old weight of a question I was never going to ask, and was never, perhaps, meant to. The relief, even now, of having let a thing stay strange.
---
We agreed, in the beginning, that there would be no calendar. Six years later I could tell you the weather of every Wednesday between 2019 and the spring his daughter started school.
*
The first time it was a coat-check. A friend's wedding, a basement room, a number on a small brass disk. He took my coat from the woman at the counter and held it for me as if I were leaving, although I had only just come down the stairs to escape the speeches, and the gesture stopped time so cleanly that we both noticed, and noticing was the entire beginning.
*
He was married. I want to say that first because I will not be saying it again. He was married, and I knew, and she knew nothing, and I have, in the years since, tried on every version of myself that this fact requires and found that none of them quite fit and I wear them anyway.
*
We met in restaurants in the wrong neighborhood. We met in the back rooms of bookstores. We met, twice, in the lobby of a hotel where neither of us was a guest, and sat in the leather chairs by the fireplace and did not touch and ordered tea we did not drink, and the not-touching, in those public rooms with the heavy carpets and the careful waitstaff, was a thing we did to each other on purpose, the way another couple might have lit candles.