The Last Goodbye

The empty vitamin bottle sat on her nightstand, a daily reminder of the supplements he'd insisted she take—his way of caring that felt like control. She hadn't touched them since he left three weeks ago.

Her iphone buzzed with his name again. Another text message she couldn't bring herself to read. The device had become a tether to a past life, glowing with notifications that felt like accusations. She'd stopped charging it properly, letting the battery drain to nothing, a small act of rebellion.

At the office, Marcus approached her desk with that predatory look—the one that made her feel like prey. 'The London deal,' he said, not asking but demanding. 'You're the bull we need to take charge.' She hated how he reduced people to animals, how he used metaphors of strength to mask his own insecurities.

She walked home through the park, the November chill seeping through her coat. A fox darted across her path, its rusty coat catching the last light. For a moment, their eyes met—wild, knowing, survival reflected back at her. She wondered what it would be like to live that way, guided only by instinct and necessity.

Their apartment still smelled faintly of his cologne. On the bookshelf, the sphinx paperweight he'd brought back from Egypt stared at her with its enigmatic face. 'What's the riddle?' she'd asked when he gave it to her. 'Figure it out,' he'd said, that playful smile she'd once found charming. Now it seemed like just another game, another test she was supposed to pass.

She sat on the floor and finally plugged in her phone. As it powered on, messages flooded in—not just from him, but from friends, from her mother offering the guest room, from the colleague who'd noticed she wasn't eating. The world hadn't stopped while she'd been frozen.

She deleted his last five texts without reading them. Then she took the sphinx and placed it in the donation box, took the vitamin bottle and tossed it in the recycling. The fox would survive. But she wouldn't have to do it like prey anymore—she could be the bull instead, charging forward, or she could simply be herself, learning to live in the uncertainty between riddles and answers.