The Neighbour Who Has Your Key and Has Never Met Your Parents
The Key Is Not About the Key
You gave it to him because it was practical. The plumber, the delivery, the time you locked yourself out at midnight and he was the only person awake in the building. Each reason was real. None of them was the reason.
The reason is that having someone close enough to walk into your home, but far enough that your mother does not know his last name, is a particular kind of freedom that women in this country learn to want without ever being taught to name it. Not a secret, exactly. A room of your own that is not on anyone else's floor plan.
What Your Parents Would Do With His Name
They would ask questions that are not really questions. How old. What does he do. Is he from a good family. These are the words, but the sentence underneath is: where does this end. And you do not know where it ends, and more than that, you do not want to know yet, and the moment his name enters that conversation it stops being yours to figure out at your own pace.
So you have kept it out of the conversation. Not because you are lying. Because you are buying yourself the only currency that disappears the moment it is named: time that belongs to you.
The Particular Loneliness of This Arrangement
There is something it costs you, though, and it is worth being honest about it.
He does not get to be fully real in your life. He exists in a partition. You can talk to him at ten at night and not mention him at lunch the next day, and over time that split starts to feel normal, and then it starts to feel like the only way to have anything for yourself. You begin to associate intimacy with hiddenness, as if the moment something is seen it is also controlled.
That is not a small thing to carry. The partition protects you and it also teaches you, slowly, that protection and concealment are the same.
What You Are Actually Deciding
You are not deciding whether to introduce him. That is the surface question. The deeper one is whether you trust yourself to hold your own ground once other people know he exists.
Because if you do, his name in your parents' house does not have to mean what they will try to make it mean. You can say: he is my neighbour, he has a key, I am not answering anything else right now. That sentence is available to you. Most women in your position have not practised saying it, which is why the easier choice is to keep the partition standing.
The key in his drawer is not the problem. The belief that visibility means surrender is the thing worth looking at.