The Riddle of Us

Margot watched Julian push the spinach around his plate, the wilted greens glistening with olive oil and something else—regret, maybe, or just the accumulated weight of twelve years.

"You haven't touched your wine," she said, and Julian looked up, his eyes flickering with that same guarded expression she'd seen the last time they'd spoken, three years ago outside the divorce court.

"I'm driving," he lied.

They were supposed to be friends. That was the official narrative, the one they'd sold to everyone at the office, at parties, to themselves. But friendship doesn't taste like this—like something that's been left out too long, like spinach that's gone slightly slimy at the edges.

"Remember Cairo?" Julian asked suddenly.

Margot stiffened. Of course she remembered. The sphinx they'd visited on their first anniversary, before everything fell apart. The way Julian had stared at that ancient limestone face with its shattered nose, its enigmatic smile, and said, "She knows something we don't."

"You said she was smiling because she'd seen it all before," Margot replied. "Love, betrayal, people thinking they're special."

"I was quoting Wikipedia, Margot."

"You were quoting something."

The silence between them felt heavy, pressurized. Margot thought about how they'd built their marriage on the foundation of being best friends first, lovers second. But when the friendship had curdled—when she'd discovered his emails to someone else, when he'd discovered her secret bank account, when they'd both realized they'd been performing intimacy rather than feeling it—there was nothing left to salvage.

The sphinx had asked its riddle, and they'd both answered wrong.

"I'm seeing someone," Julian said quietly.

Margot nodded, surprised by the dull thud in her chest. Not sharp pain, just something heavy and final, like a book closing forever. "Is she your friend?"

Julian laughed, startled. "I don't know. Does it matter?"

"It mattered to us."

"Did it?" He gestured at his uneaten food, at her half-empty wine glass. "Or did we just like saying it?"

Outside, rain began to streak the restaurant window, distorting the streetlights into bleeding watercolors. Margot thought about riddles without answers, about the spinach that would be thrown away uneaten, about the way some friendships are just monuments to who you used to be.

"No," she said finally. "I suppose it didn't."