The Riddle of Goodbye

Margot stood in the produce aisle, squeezing an orange with perhaps too much force. The citrus scent wafted up—sharp, bright, uncomplicated. Unlike everything else.

"We need to talk," David had said that morning, his voice gentle in that way that means something terrible is coming.

She'd known for months. The signs were there: the late nights at work, the phone screen darkening when she walked into the room, the distance growing like a tumor between them in bed. David was a sphinx of a man—inscrutable, composed, full of riddles she couldn't solve. Their marriage had become a series of cryptexes without combinations.

At home, Buster—their golden retriever—sensed it too. The dog had stopped greeting David at the door, opting instead to watch with those knowing eyes that dogs sometimes have, as if understanding human betrayal better than humans do.

"It's not what you think," David had insisted, but isn't that what they all say?

The truth came out in fragments: a colleague named Sara, emotional intimacy, the slow erosion of their seven-year marriage. Not an affair, technically. Just a fox in the henhouse of their marriage, chewing through the wire fence of trust.

Margot tossed the orange into her basket. She was thirty-five, too old for reinvention, too young for resignation. The existential question hung before her like the sphinx's ancient riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?

A man, she thought bitterly. A man who destroys everything he touches while convincing himself he's doing the right thing.

She spotted the oranges again—vibrant against the sterile grocery store backdrop. Orange like the sunset they'd watched on their honeymoon in Santorini. Orange like the safety cones at the street construction outside their building, the one that had been underway for six goddamn months.

Some things just fall apart. No villain, no hero. just entropy wearing human clothes.

She purchased the single orange and walked home, where Buster waited by the door, his tail thumping against the floorboards. At least someone was still glad to see her. At least some loyalty remained in this fox-eat-sphinx world.