Riddle of the Unmade Bed

She lay beside him, fingers tracing the scars on his back, each one a question he refused to answer. Ten years of marriage, and Marcus remained a sphinx—cryptic, beautiful, utterly unreachable.

"You're staring," he mumbled into the pillow.

"I'm counting."

"What?"

"The ways you leave without moving."

He rolled over, eyes the color of a bruised orange. His grandmother had given them that glass bowl, the one she'd smashed last week. Not in anger. Just something that needed breaking.

The bed shifted. Their cat, Binx, jumped between them, a furry judgment neither could refute. The animal had belonged to Marcus's first wife. Sarah had died three years before they met, but in this house, she was still the one who'd bought the throw pillows, chosen the paint color, decided which books deserved the shelves.

Elena sometimes felt like the understudy in a play that had closed years ago.

"I made dinner," she said. "Salmon. Spinach from the garden."

"Not hungry."

"You're never hungry."

He sat up, Binx sliding to the floor with a complaint. "What do you want, El?"

"The riddle."

"What riddle?"

"The one you've been asking yourself since she died." Her voice didn't shake. She'd practiced this conversation in the shower, in the car, in the grocery store aisles. "The answer isn't in this room. It hasn't been for a long time."

Marcus stared at his hands. Those hands that had held Sarah through chemotherapy, that had buried her, that had somehow convinced Elena he was ready to love again.

She'd wanted to believe she could be the one to solve him. The wife who'd finally unwrap the sphinx.

But here's what she'd learned, somewhere between his nightmares and her loneliness: some riddles aren't meant to be answered by other people.

"The cat goes with you," she said. "He knows where home is."

Marcus didn't cry. He just nodded, already ghost-like, already somewhere between her arms and whatever came after.

The orange glass was gone. The bed would be unmade tonight and tomorrow and maybe forever. But for the first time in years, Elena felt hungry.