Riddles in the Garden

Mara found the iphone at 2 AM, its screen glowing softly on her husband's nightstand like a dying star. She shouldn't have looked. She never looked before. But the cat — Bast, her shadow, her familiar — had jumped onto the bed and knocked it askew, and there it was: a message thread that made her stomach hollow out.

'Can't stop thinking about last night.'

Three days ago. While Mara was at her mother's funeral.

She carried the phone to the garden, where the sphinx statue David had bought in Cairo watched her with its limestone eyes. He'd always loved riddles, loved knowing things others didn't. That was the first thing that had attracted her to him — his cleverness, the way he could untangle any problem. Now she wondered how many riddles he'd solved that she'd never even known existed.

A fox appeared at the edge of the property, its coat the color of dried blood. It watched her with assessing eyes, then slipped away into the darkness. Smart animal. Knew when to cut its losses.

Bast wound around her ankles, purring loudly. The cat had probably known all along. Animals always did.

She sat on the cold stone bench and scrolled through months of messages. Names, dates, hotel rooms. The careful architecture of deception. David had built a second life with the same precision he used to build investment portfolios, and she'd been living inside it like a fool, content in her ignorance.

The sphinx seemed to smile. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? The answer wasn't man. The answer was trust: blind, then broken, then gone.

Mara thought about the fox again. There was something admirable about its pragmatism. No sentiment, no hesitation. Just survival.

She placed the iphone back on the nightstand exactly as she'd found it. Then she went to the closet and pulled out her suitcase.

Some riddles solve themselves.