Riddles in the Dark

The spinach leaf clung stubbornly to Maya's front tooth, a small green flag of surrender. She caught her reflection in the restaurant window—thirty-eight years old and still fumbling through the performance of adulthood.

Across the table, David's thumb scrolled his iPhone screen, that familiar blue light painting his face in cold tones. He hadn't looked up since the appetizers arrived. His hair, once thick and dark at the temples, was beginning its slow retreat, each lost strand another mile between who they were and who they'd become.

"You're doing it again," she said.

"Doing what?" His eyes never left the screen.

"Being somewhere else. While you're right here."

He sighed, that heavy, put-upon exhale she'd come to dread. "It's just an email, Maya. Not everything is a referendum on our marriage."

But it was, wasn't it? The small erosions, the tiny absences—that's how civilizations fell. Not with earthquakes or fires, but with one person looking at their phone while the other tried to tell them about their day. That's how you woke up one morning and realized you were sleeping next to a stranger.

They'd visited Egypt two years ago, stood before the Great Sphinx together. She'd marveled at how something so solid could endure millennia while they couldn't seem to endure five minutes without checking their notifications. The riddle wasn't what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in evening. The riddle was how two people could love each other and still somehow be alone.

"David."

"What."

"I have spinach in my teeth, don't I?"

He finally looked up. Really looked. For a moment, something softened behind his eyes—recognition, maybe, or just the shock of actually seeing her. "Yeah," he said. "Left side."

"And you weren't going to tell me?"

"I thought you knew."

"That's the problem," she said, signaling the waiter for the check. "I thought you knew me, too."