Riddles in the Dark

The spinach hung from her teeth like a tiny green flag of surrender. Maya caught her reflection in the shop window—forty-two years old, running late for another blind date her sister had sworn would be 'the one,' looking like she'd just finished eating a salad without a mirror.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and kept walking. Running was easier than stopping. Running was what she did best—out of conversations, out of relationships, out of the life she'd carefully constructed in Chicago to escape the wreckage she'd left in Seattle.

The restaurant was dimly lit, candles flickering on tables occupied by couples who actually looked like they belonged together. Then she saw him.

Ethan.

Not a date. Her ex-husband. Sitting alone at a corner table, reading something with an intensity that made her stomach do that familiar little flip it had done when she'd first met him fifteen years ago in that used bookstore off Broadway.

She should have turned around and kept running. That was her pattern. But his eyes found hers across the room, and suddenly she was frozen, pinned like a butterfly in a display case.

He motioned for her to sit.

'I ordered the spinach lasagna,' he said, his voice still carrying that same warm timber that used to read her bedtime stories when she was sick. 'Remember how you used to say it tasted like reassurance?'

Maya sat. 'I said a lot of things.'

'You did.' He closed his book. It was a collection of Egyptian myths. 'I've been reading about the Sphinx. How she asked riddles and devoured those who couldn't answer them. Do you remember what you asked me the night you left?'

Maya felt something crack open in her chest. She did remember. She'd stood in their doorway, boxes packed, and asked: If you could go back to the moment you knew you loved me, would you still walk into that bookstore?

He'd never answered.

'No,' Ethan said now, answering a question she'd asked three years ago. 'I wouldn't go back. But I would walk into that bookstore again today.' His eyes held hers. 'Even knowing how it ends.'

Outside, rain began to fall against the restaurant windows. Maya wasn't running anymore. She sat perfectly still and finally let herself remember what she'd been running from all this time—not the pain of their ending, but the terrifying possibility that some things, maybe the best things, might be worth breaking apart and putting back together, over and over again.