I'm relatively new to Redis and trying to understand how I can use WATCH / UNWATCH to address a concurrency / race condition issue.

All of the documentation I've read describes WATCH in the context of a transaction, but can I WATCH and UNWATCH a key if no transaction occurs?

Here is the scenario:

• I need to modify an object in cache but due to TTL I cannot guarantee that object exists
• I don't want to fetch the object, check it exists, and then call WATCH, because it is possible for TTL to expire between fetching and WATCHing.
• Solution is to WATCH the key, fetch the object, check it exists, and UNWATCH the key if the object doesn't exist

Is this workflow possible, and is there a better way to achieve my goal?