The toy's first words were, 'You don't like the cushion.'

This was accurate, but inconvenient. Simon had bought the cushion. It was mustard, heavily textured and positioned on our couch as though it had won a small territorial dispute. I had called it interesting three weeks earlier and hoped the matter would end there.

Now a purple object in a cardboard box had reopened negotiations.

Simon and I stared at it. We were both in our early fifties, both old enough to have bought things online that failed to match the description, and neither of us prepared for an item that appeared to have read the room better than the courier.

'Was that you?' he asked.

'No.'

The object said nothing else.

It was a vibrator, though at that moment its most distinctive feature was apparently an interest in soft furnishings. Simon had bought it from a little shop called The Honest Hours during a weekend away in a country town neither of us could now locate neatly on a map. The woman behind the counter had described it as conversational. Simon had assumed that was branding.

He had shown it to me before buying it. We'd laughed about the name and agreed it might be a fun addition to a quiet weekend at home. There had been no surprise expectation attached to the gift. The surprise, as it turned out, was administrative: the thing could speak.

'Probably a recorded phrase,' Simon said.

'About the cushion?'

'Could be a coincidence.'

He picked up the leaflet. It contained three short paragraphs about the device's controls and one sentence printed at the bottom: Ask carefully. Answers may precede questions.

We looked at each other.

'I don't like that sentence,' I said.

'Neither do I.'

From the box came a calm voice. 'You liked being asked what you wanted.'

The voice wasn't male or female in any obvious way. It sounded like someone speaking from the next room, clear enough to understand but difficult to imagine belonging to a face.

I sat down. Simon remained standing, leaflet in hand.

'That could also be recorded,' he said, with less conviction.

'Yes. A remarkably specific customer experience recording.'

The cushion sat between us and the box, looking pleased with itself.

We had lived together for seven years in Bendigo. Ours was a good relationship, by which I mean it contained affection, practical care and several recurring disagreements neither of us had managed to retire. We liked each other. We also occasionally treated the avoidance of a conversation as evidence that the conversation wasn't necessary.

Simon put the toy on the coffee table, still unused and entirely outside the plans we'd had for the evening. We were now investigating an object, not pursuing romance.

'What else does it say?' he asked.

'I'm not sure I want to encourage it.'

He pressed a button. A small light came on.

'The dishwasher does not load itself correctly when you leave the room,' it said.

I closed my eyes.

Simon turned towards me. 'What does that mean?'

'I sometimes rearrange it after you've loaded it.'

'Sometimes?'

The object said, 'Most times.'

'Right,' Simon said.

'I know how that sounds.'

'Like you have a preferred location for every spoon and a secret inspection schedule.'

I laughed, partly because he was right and partly because the toy had somehow become the least discreet household witness imaginable.

'Ask it something about you,' I said.

'I didn't ask it anything about you.'

That was true. Neither of us had asked. The answers were simply arriving.

Simon suggested putting on music. It was an ordinary attempt to reclaim the room, and I nodded. He chose an album we'd played on our first weekend away. Before the opening track began, the object said, 'You remember the rain more clearly than the view.'

We looked at each other. We had spent that weekend in a small cabin, hoping for long walks and getting three days of weather instead. The view was mostly fog. What I remembered was Simon reading beside me while rain tapped the roof, neither of us feeling obliged to make the trip impressive.

'We both remember that,' I said.

The object was silent.

'It doesn't know everything,' Simon said.

'We don't know what it knows.'

He stopped the music before the first song finished. The memory had been ours, warm and unexamined. Hearing it returned as evidence made me want to close a door around it.

For a moment we considered the possibility of a hidden microphone, an elaborate joke, some ordinary mechanism with an extraordinary talent for selecting familiar arguments. Simon unplugged the charging cable from the wall. The voice continued immediately.

'You don't want to go to the reunion.'

Simon lowered his hand.

His old work group had planned a reunion for the following month. He'd told me he was looking forward to it. I'd offered to drive because it was out of town.

'You don't?' I asked.

He looked at the toy as though it had stepped across an invisible line.

'It's complicated.'

'We can put it away.'

He nodded quickly. I reached for the box.

Before I touched it, the voice said, 'You want to be the person who wants to go.'

Simon sat beside me. His expression wasn't frightened now. It was tired.

'I used to like that group,' he said. 'I keep expecting to feel the same about seeing them. Then I picture the evening and realise I'll spend most of it explaining why I left.'

I waited. The toy remained quiet, which felt almost worse than its speaking.

'You don't have to go because I said I'd drive,' I said.

'I know. I just didn't want to seem...'

He stopped. He couldn't find the word. I didn't offer one.

After a while he said, 'Smaller than I was then.'

I took his hand. 'You don't seem smaller to me.'

The object said, 'That is true.'

'Cheers,' I told it. 'We were managing that bit.'

Simon laughed, a small, grateful sound. Then both of us went quiet again.

The room had changed. We weren't playing with a novelty that delivered amusingly awkward remarks. We were sitting with something that could place a sentence between us before the person who owned it had decided to speak.

I didn't like that, even when the sentence was useful. Especially then, perhaps. A conversation was more than extracting the correct words from someone. It mattered that they chose to offer them.

Simon reached for the leaflet again. On the back, where we'd both previously seen blank paper, a new line appeared.

Silence is not the same as a false answer.

We watched the letters settle. Not print arriving through a mechanism. Just dark marks becoming dark enough to read, as though they had always been present under the surface.

'All right,' Simon said. 'That's enough.'

He put the leaflet in the box. I placed the toy beside it. We closed the lid.

For ten seconds, the room was silent.

Then, from inside the cardboard: 'The spare room is not only an office.'

My hand froze on the lid.

Simon looked at me. He knew the room I meant. We'd been discussing turning it into a shared workspace. I had agreed, helped choose a desk and avoided saying why I kept delaying the actual rearrangement.

'You don't have to explain,' he said immediately.

I appreciated that more than any demand for honesty could have made me appreciate him.

'I might want to,' I said. 'But not because that thing has announced a topic.'

He nodded. We carried the box to the laundry, put it in an empty storage cupboard and closed the door. No dramatic disposal, no attempt to test how far its voice carried. We simply wanted a room between us and it.

Back in the lounge, Simon moved the mustard cushion off the couch.

'I do like it,' he said.

'You can keep it.'

'I know. I'd just prefer it wasn't chairing the meeting.'

We sat together without talking for a few minutes. The ordinary sounds returned: a car passing, the fridge, the slight creak of the couch when Simon shifted. I realised how much attention we'd given the object's silences, waiting for the next answer.

Then I told him about the spare room.

It had been mine in a small but important way. Not legally, not exclusively. Simply a place where I left a book open, sat with a difficult mood or worked on something without explaining the project. Turning it into another efficient shared space felt like losing a private corner I hadn't known how to name without sounding unkind.

Simon listened. He didn't ask the toy to verify anything. He didn't point out that I'd agreed to the desk.

'We can keep it as it is,' he said.

'We might not need to. I just want us to work it out knowing that's part of it.'

'Okay.'

It was a better conversation than the one we'd been avoiding. It was also unfinished, which felt right. We didn't need every part resolved before bed.

The next morning, we searched for the shop. The receipt gave a street name and a town, but the address led to an empty corner in the photographs we found. Simon checked the receipt again. The ink had faded everywhere except the word honest, which remained dark enough to seem freshly printed. He held the paper towards the window, but there was nothing more to read.

Neither of us suggested another experiment.

We left the box in the cupboard while deciding what to do. For the rest of the day, it made no sound. We cooked, went for a walk and discussed perfectly ordinary things. Simon cancelled the reunion politely. I moved the unused desk catalogue off the spare-room chair.

That evening we sat in the lounge. The mustard cushion had returned, now at Simon's end of the couch. I found its continued existence oddly reassuring. Honesty had not required one of us to win the furnishing argument.

From somewhere close by came a sentence.

'I'm frightened that being easy to live with has made me difficult to know.'

We both turned.

The laundry door was closed. The cupboard beyond it was closed. The toy was unplugged, boxed and silent as far as either of us could tell.

'Was that you?' Simon asked.

I opened my mouth. I remembered the words. I could feel how they might have formed in my throat. But I also remembered hearing them as though someone else had spoken.

'I thought it was you,' I said.

Simon stared at me. His hand found mine on the couch.

Neither of us went to the laundry. Neither asked the object for an answer.

We stayed where we were and began, carefully, to talk.