Riddles in the Glass

The vitamin supplements sat on her nightstand like accusations—thirty orange bottles lined up in military formation. D3, B12, iron, magnesium, a regimented pharmaceutical army trying to fix what three years of fertility treatments couldn't.

"You're like a sphinx," Marcus said, not looking up from his phone. "All these riddles about what's wrong, and I'm just supposed to guess."

Maya watched the condensation on her water glass slide down like tears. She'd stopped crying weeks ago; her body had learned the geometry of disappointment. "I'm not riddling anything. The doctors don't know either. That's the problem with mysteries sometimes—they're just mysteries."

His scoff hit the wall. "Right. Just like your 'work trips' to Chicago."

The corporate pyramid scheme—her actual job—had sent her there three times last quarter. She'd climbed three levels up the hierarchy while her uterus remained a vacant lot. Irony was the only thing flourishing.

"Check my calendar, Marcus."

He finally looked at her, really looked. The waterworks were scheduled for tomorrow morning, another invasive procedure, another orchestrated letdown. "What if it never happens?" he asked, and his voice cracked.

She swallowed her vitamin cocktail with a gulp of lukewarm tap water. "Then we figure out what 'it' even was."

The ancient sphinx had asked: What walks on four legs, then two, then three? The answer was man. Nobody mentioned the part about the thing that walks on two legs and keeps waiting.

"I'm tired," she said. "Not of trying. Of being the problem to solve."

Marcus set down his phone. For the first time in months, the room felt less like an interrogation chamber and more like a bedroom. He reached across the space between them, his hand finding hers over the cooling water glass.

"Let's stop," he said quietly. "The treatments. The calendar. The fucking vitamins."

Something released in her chest, sharp and sudden as grief. She'd been prepared for failure, not surrender.

"And then?" she whispered.

"Then we learn who we are when we're not becoming parents."

Outside, rain began to fall, washing the windows in dark streaks. Maya watched the water blur the city lights until they glowed like small, uncertain stars. She took her husband's hand, and for the first time in three years, didn't calculate the timing.