Winged heart padlock with keyhole

Under the bench lamp you turn it slowly. The heart is cast in brass gone the colour of weak tea, its scrolls so fine that a fingernail would catch in them. Someone spent an entire winter filing the wings, one feather at a time. The keyhole sits dead centre like a full stop. The original key went down a drain years ago, according to the scrap of card wedged in the lid, and nobody has been able to make a copy that doesn't look wrong.

A key is out of the question, so you take the rake pick and the tension wrench and listen to the pins. It gives on the third try with a sound like a held breath let out. Inside the shackle, where nobody will ever look, someone has scratched two sets of initials and a date, and beneath them a single word: always. You close it again with a small click, and the wings still lift when you lift the heart.

On Saturday you won't be there to see it fastened to the railing, but you know the moment well enough. The groom will turn the lock, the bride will laugh, and the river will go on being the river underneath them. You put the padlock back in its tissue, wrap the box twice with string, and write on the lid in capitals: OPENS FOR TWO.