The Second Key

Every apartment Desmond had ever rented, he'd had a second key cut in the first week. Not for anyone. He just had it made and put it in the drawer with the takeout menus and the batteries that might still be good.

Six apartments. Six keys. He'd kept every one of them, which meant the drawer in the new place already had five keys in it that opened doors in three cities where other people now slept.

Priya found them while looking for a bottle opener.

"What are these?"

He told her, because it had never occurred to him that it was the kind of thing you'd hide.

She turned them over in her palm. They were all slightly different colors, brass going green in different weathers.

"Who were you expecting?" she said.

And that was the question, wasn't it. He'd been cutting spare keys since he was twenty-three and he had never once, not for a night, handed one to anybody. He'd just kept making them. Kept the door ready.

Desmond took the newest one off the pile — bright, unweathered, cut nine days ago — and put it in her hand and closed her fingers over it, and neither of them said anything for a while, and the radiator ticked, and the drawer stayed open.