The Last Riddle

Elara found him in the study, surrounded by cardboard boxes. Their divorce papers sat on the desk like an abandoned sphinx, silent and monumental, posing questions neither could answer anymore. The riddle of seven years together had finally been solved, though the answer left them both hollow.

"You're taking the bear?" she asked, gesturing to the mounted taxidermy piece on the wall. Marcus's grandfather had shot it in Alaska, some twisted inheritance neither of them wanted but somehow accumulated anyway.

"Someone has to," Marcus said, not looking up from his tape gun. The plastic strip tore with a sound like finality. "You hate how its eyes follow you around the room."

He wasn't wrong. The bear's glass eyes had witnessed everything—their first Christmas, the fight about his mother, the night she'd stopped believing they'd make it. It had absorbed their silence like a dark sponge.

"What about Buster?" The old golden retriever raised his head from his bed in the corner, sensing the tension. He'd been Marcus's dog originally, but Elara had walked him every morning for three years. The divorce decree said Buster went with the house, which went with Marcus.

"He's old," Marcus said finally. "It would confuse him."

Elara felt something crack open in her chest. "You're keeping the house, the bear, and the dog. You get to keep everything that reminds us of us."

Marcus looked at her then, really looked at her, for the first time in months. "Is that what you think? That I'm keeping things to remember?"

"Aren't you?"

"The bear goes to my brother. Buster's hips are giving out—he needs a yard. And I'm selling the house, Elara. I can't afford it alone."

The sphinx on the desk seemed to smirk. Perhaps that was the real riddle: how two people who knew each other so intimately could have misunderstood everything.

"I could take him," she said, nodding toward Buster. "I walk him every day anyway."

Marcus's shoulders dropped. "Yeah. You probably should."

Buster wagged his tail once, thumping against the floorboards. Some arrangements, unlike marriages, could still be salvaged.