The Fox in the Mirror

Margaret stood before the bathroom mirror at 2 AM, the fluorescent light revealing every betrayal of the past decade. She placed her husband's hat on her own head—a tweed flat cap he'd worn to their first dinner, the one that still smelled faintly of his pomade and the cigarettes he'd sworn to quit. The funeral was three days ago. The casseroles had stopped arriving. The phone had gone quiet.

You always were a clever little fox, David had told her once, not entirely as a compliment. It was after she'd negotiated the promotion he'd wanted, after she'd unraveled the embezzlement at his firm that had sent his business partner to prison. Clever. Fox. The words curled together in her memory, sharp teeth and sleek fur.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. Sarah.

Margaret watched it ring. Sarah, who had held her while she cried at the reception. Sarah, who had emailed David the night before he died, Margaret discovered later, when the grief was fresh enough to make her reckless enough to check. Nothing incriminating. Nothing explicit. Just: I'm here if you need to talk. Always.

Had he?

The hat slid from Margaret's fingers and landed softly on the tile floor. She picked it up, turned it over in her hands. David had never been a faithful man. But he had been her friend, once, before marriage and mortgage and resentment had calcified into something brittle and gray.

She thought of the fox that lived in the ravine behind their house—the one she'd watched from the kitchen window, sleek and solitary, moving through the overgrown garden with the easy confidence of creatures who understood exactly what they were and what they needed. Last week, she'd seen it with something small and lifeless in its jaws. Nature didn't apologize. It didn't second-guess its instincts.

The phone stopped ringing. Then started again.

Margaret answered.

"I can't stop thinking about him," Sarah said, her voice rough with something that sounded like grief. "I keep expecting him to walk through the door."

"Me too," Margaret said. And realized it wasn't entirely a lie.

"Do you want to come over? We could drink wine and say terrible things about him."

Margaret looked at the hat in her hands, at the woman in the mirror who looked like a stranger wearing her dead husband's clothes. "Yes," she said. "I'll be there in twenty minutes."

She hung up, placed the hat back on the shelf, and turned off the light. Some hunts required more than cleverness. Some required a certain willing surrender to the things that might destroy you.