My mother is in this building three days a week and must never know

My mother lives two floors above us and is in the building most of the week. She has a key and she uses it. She would not survive knowing about any of this, in a way I am not remotely prepared to test, so the entire architecture of my life in this is built around one woman's ignorance and it is more tiring than I ever expected.

In practice it means nothing happens at home, which on this board makes me the odd one out, because everybody here has a spare room and a long lease and cannot understand why I am being awkward about it. I am not being awkward. I am forty four and I have a mother upstairs.

So I need somewhere else, which means a man with his own place, and I am painfully aware of how that reads and I dislike writing it. It is not a description of what I find attractive. It is a straightforward consequence of a stairwell.

Neukölln, married sixteen years, five of them like this. My husband knows everything, has met everyone, and carries the whole weight of the discretion alongside me, which has probably drawn us closer than the arrangement itself ever did.

Not looking for anybody who will suggest, helpfully, that I simply tell her. Not looking for anybody who finds the caution excessive without having lived underneath it. Not looking for anything at short notice, since short notice is the one thing my life cannot produce.