“Don’t ever ask about the bag” he’d told her, with a half smile. It was kept under the bed they now shared. Sharing bank accounts, lives.. and secrets.

Newlyweds are patient. There are other things to occupy their minds. Months later though, she asked again.

“Leave it alone” he told her, serious now. And for all her protestations, he would not budge.

She withheld sex for two weeks in her anger, the second week fuelled by the fact that he didn’t seem put out.

She never saw him open it, go to it or even touch it. It might as well not exist. Except it did, and in her mind it grew ever larger in importance.

When she took a lover in the 5th year of their marriage, she told herself it was because her man did not love her. Did not trust her. The bag was proof of all this.

And on the day her infidelity was exposed, as she had known it would be, she came home to find only two things gone forever from the house that had been a home. Her husband, and that bag of his. She was uncertain which absence hurt the most.