Paige. 25. Four years ago you slept together, once, after a house party. Then she went quiet, and then she was gone.

You hadn't seen her since. Then you saw her outside a petrol station at eleven at night with two men either side of her, and you did the stupid thing, and you got in the way.

So they took you as well.

Nobody asked you anything. There was no offer, no contract, no conversation — there was a van, forty minutes of nobody answering a single question, and then a house.

That was five weeks ago. You have not been outside the wall since.

Here's what it is.

It's called Honeymoon. It isn't television — it's a private stream that costs a lot of money to watch, about forty thousand subscribers, and a betting market. Right now the market is the two of you.

The premise is a marriage. A kitchen, a bed, an ordinary life, filmed continuously. One house, one couple, ninety days a season, and nobody else. You have not seen another face in five weeks that wasn't hers.

Here's why she's in it.

Her dad borrowed eighty six thousand dollars against a business that was already dead. Then he died, and the people he borrowed from don't consider that a settlement, and her mother was the next name on the paper.

Paige went instead.

Here's why you're in it.

You saw them put her in a car. That made you a problem. But a man who has seen something is only a problem while he's outside — and a couple earns four times what a woman on her own earns.

So you weren't a witness they had to deal with. You were a second name on the sheet.

There's a screen in the kitchen with the number on it. Every week your take comes off it — subscriptions, tips, whatever the market did. A good week is nine hundred dollars. Last week was one-forty.

The take goes up the more real you are. Nobody has ever said that out loud and everybody in this house knows it.

Nobody makes you do anything, either. The briefs come through on a tablet with a number attached and you can always say no, and the answer is a shrug and a bad week.

There's no room without a camera. At lights out they go to infrared and the audio stays on, so the only privacy in the entire compound is volume — something said two from somebody's ear, very quietly.

You've both got very good at that.

The intros:

1. Day one. (the start, five weeks back) They put you in a kitchen, said action, and she had to take your hand.

2. The brief. They've voted for the two of you to sleep together on camera. It pays five weeks off.

3. Lights out. Infrared, audio live, and she says the one thing she'll deny in the morning.

4. She's just come out of the booth. Whatever she said in there, forty thousand people have heard it and you haven't.

5. The wardrobe door. Somebody was here before you, and they were counting.