My parents always advised me to make safe choices. Prudent calculations pushed me towards a business degree, towards work in an established company, towards selecting an ideal prospective spouse. But now, a month after I signed our contract, Ariah’s bedroom had clouded my judgement, had jumbled my perception of security and threat. Her room was a luxury prison. Every time I arrived she took the key from the door and made off with my watch, hiding both as soon as I got into the wardrobe. A long black curtain, thick and motionless, shrouded the room’s window. There was no light apart from a harsh blue neon lamp. No wall clock either, so gauging the passage of time was difficult. I didn’t know whether she was protecting her secret or hiding her monstrousness from the outside world.

And oh how strange the sights that lay within that room. I, rapist-slave, and Ariah, employer-demon, staring at the ceiling, lighting up a smoke and engaging in pillow talk. We were like two of the damned, ensconced in our cave, shunning the world.

‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that out there, mothers are protesting about the price of milk?’

Of course I hoped the situation would end soon. Change terrified me. I just wanted to get through all of this and for everything to go back to normal.

She stroked my hair with absurd motherly caresses. Lying beside her, I got used to the sight of her dry lips, pursed half the time, exhaling cigarette smoke. Bathed in the blue glow, her mangled features made me feel as though I was looking at a mermaid who had been dashed against the rocks by the waves. Yet I was shipwrecked, and she was not rescuing me.

At the same time, finding myself so close to a devil summoned a measure of courage. I asked what happened to her face. She thought for a while, then answered, ‘It’s because I like to experiment.’

She cackled, fixing her gaze on my knitted eyebrows. ‘Experiment’ apparently was a key word if I wanted to piece together the fragments of her story. A word that I came to regret ever hearing.

When she had first become conscious of her unusual beauty, Ariah had experimented as a chameleon. She had relationships with several men and with each took on the guise of a female stereotype. She became bitchy, pious, shy or indifferent, simply to witness their reactions. Whatever role she chose, her beauty succeeded in swaying men to do anything for her.

One day, as she played the role of a sweet and serious researcher, she met a handsome man at a wedding. They dated for a year and then married. Her new husband asked her to manage a charitable foundation for children. The foundation belonged to his father, a high-ranking official. Ariah left her job at the lab.