The Riddle of Goodbye

Margot stood in her sister's bedroom, palm pressed against the cool glass of the window. Outside, the orange glow of sunset bled across the sky, the same color as the pill bottles lined up on Sarah's nightstand. Three months since the funeral, and Margot still couldn't bring herself to pack anything.

She picked up the floppy straw hat from the bedpost—Sarah's favorite, the one she'd worn to every beach trip they'd taken together. A friend had once told Margot that grief was like a sphinx: inscrutable, posing riddles you couldn't solve until you stopped trying to outsmart them. Margot had thought that was pretentious bullshit at the time.

Now she wasn't so sure.

The hat smelled of coconut sunscreen and something else—hospital disinfectant, maybe, or maybe that was just memory contaminating her senses. She remembered their last conversation, Sarah thin and furious that Margot had come at all. 'You don't get to play the good sister now,' she'd said. 'Not after all these years of nothing.'

Margot had walked out. She'd had time—she thought. Always more time.

She opened the closet and found the shoebox of photographs, rubber-banded and dust-covered. Inside: two girls on a boardwalk, arms linked, faces sunburned and happy. Before the addiction. Before the silence. Before Margot had learned that some distances couldn't be crossed, not even with love as the bridge.

Her phone buzzed. Mark, asking if she was coming to dinner. He was patient, kind—everything she wasn't sure she deserved anymore. The sphinx's riddle wasn't about letting go, she realized. It was about living with the things you couldn't fix.

Margot placed the hat in her suitcase. She packed the photographs too. Some heavinesses you carried forward; some you learned to hold with both hands, open-palmed, knowing they would never be light again.