Riddles Without Answers

The iPhone buzzed between them on the restaurant table like a trapped insect. Marcus didn't reach for it. Neither did Sarah.

"Are you going to get that?" she asked, not really asking.

"It can wait."

The sphinx had nothing on them, really. At least the sphinx offered riddles you could solve. Their riddle was three years of marriage, twelve of friendship, and now this — this silence that had settled over their dinner like water rising slowly, imperceptibly, until they were already submerged.

Marcus watched the candle flame flicker between them. He thought about the goldfish bowl in their apartment, how the fish swam in endless circles, forgetting each revolution was the same as the last. Maybe that was the trick. Maybe the goldfish was the genius, not the fool. Memory was the burden.

"I talked to Elena today," Sarah said.

His stomach tightened. "And?"

"She says the new position in Chicago is mine if I want it."

There it was. The thing they'd been sphinxing around for months, the riddle neither wanted to speak aloud. Her career, his tenure track, two cities, one marriage. Choose one.

Their cat, Barnaby, would be fine either way. The cat had already figured out what humans never seemed to grasp: attachment was suffering. Barnaby loved you, but he also loved himself equally well.

Marcus's phone buzzed again. This time a text from his department chair: final offer on tenure. The timing was almost funny.

"Chicago," he said, testing the word like it was a foreign object. "That's far."

"Eight hours by train," she said. "Could be weekends."

"Could be."

They both knew it wouldn't be. Weekend marriages were like weekend faith — something you believed in when it was convenient, not when it mattered. The water had risen to their chests now.

The goldfish at home would probably swim to the front of its bowl and wait for food tomorrow morning, forgetting there had been two people who fed it, not one.

"I want you to be happy," Marcus said finally. The terrible words, the ones that meant I love you enough to let you go, I love you not enough to follow.

Sarah reached across the table and took his hand. Her palm was warm, her fingers familiar as the back of his own.

"I know," she said. "I want you to be happy too."

They sat there as the restaurant emptied, holding hands over a table of uneaten food, while their phones lit up with futures that didn't fit together, riddles without answers, and somewhere in the distance, water kept moving toward an inevitable sea.