Turn 8 of 13

Ask Rae to try your key in your flat door herself

Rae looks at you, then at the key still pressed into your reddened palm. She doesn't argue. She pulls her dressing gown tight, pushes her feet into the battered trainers she keeps by the door, and holds out her hand. You drop the key into it. The metal is warm from your grip and you let go of it the way you'd let go of a coal — quickly, all at once.

The stairwell is colder now, or you're more aware of it. Rae takes the steps quickly, the trainers slapping on concrete, and you follow three paces behind. Your own feet know the route but your body doesn't want to make the climb — not resistance, not exactly, more like walking into a current that pushes back. You keep going. On the second-floor landing you watch Rae fit the key into the lock. She turns it without hesitation, the same motion you've made a hundred times, and the bolt slides open with a sound like a fingernail on fabric, quiet and ordinary and completely, simply fine.

Rae pushes the door wide. Your flat is exactly as you left it — the hallway mirror angled to face the door, the kitchen light off, the air still and slightly stale. Nothing is wrong with the lock. Nothing is wrong with the key. The problem sat in your hand, in the wrist that wouldn't turn, in the part of you that listened to something you can't remember hearing.

"Sam." Rae's voice is careful. She's standing in your doorway, looking back at you, the key dangling from her fingers.

"It's open. It was always open."

You don't go in. You stand on the landing and the hallway stretches out behind her — the mirror, the door, the angle you set in the night without knowing why — and it looks like a room that was arranged. Not lived in. Arranged. The mirror catches your reflection and holds it at the wrong distance, too close, too deliberate, and you understand suddenly that it isn't there so you can see yourself. It's there so you can be seen.

"I can't go back in there," you say, and it comes out true, and yours, and unaltered. The words don't bend. They land where you put them.

Rae pulls the door shut. The lock catches with a clean click. She drops the key into her dressing gown pocket and turns to face you, and her expression has shifted from concern into something harder, more focused — the face she wore when she told you to sit, when she took your wrist, when she read the email.

"Right," she says. "You're telling me everything. Now. My flat, tea, and you don't touch that phone until I say."