The Riddle of Us

The surveillance photos lay scattered across my kitchen table like baseball cards from a childhood I barely remembered. My dog, Buster, nudged my hand with that hopeful look that said *you've been staring at nothing for hours, please acknowledge my existence*.

"Sorry, buddy," I murmured, scratching behind his ears. In this line of work, you learn quickly that a spy's life is 90% waiting and 10% questioning whether you're the bad guy.

The photos showed her—Elena—with him. Some architectural consultant with gentle hands and an easy laugh. They were at a café, then walking through the park, then outside what looked like his apartment building at 11:47 PM. I'd taken them myself over the past three weeks. The irony wasn't lost on me: I make my living gathering compromising information on corporate targets, yet I couldn't bring myself to look at the evidence of my own marriage's collapse.

Buster's water bowl sat near the corner, and beside it, the goldfish bowl Elena had bought last winter. She'd named him Apollo because, she'd said, "He's beautiful and mysterious, like a Greek god." The fish swam in endless circles, three seconds of memory at a time, trapped in a glass universe of his own making. Sometimes I envied him.

I thought about the sphinx she'd pointed out to me on our honeymoon in Egypt. *The riddle of existence,* she'd whispered against my shoulder, *isn't about monsters at the gate. It's about what we choose to let in.*

She'd known, even then. About the job I did under layers of corporate nondisclosure agreements. About the way I'd already learned to compartmentalize, to watch people without really seeing them. She'd married me anyway, and somewhere along the way, she'd stopped waiting for me to become someone else.

"Four balls and you walk," my old baseball coach used to say when I wanted to swing at everything. Some relationships are like that—you keep getting pitched opportunities, and eventually you have to realize that standing there, refusing to swing, is its own kind of courage.

I swept the photos into a manila envelope. Tomorrow I'd deliver the report to my client, but tonight, I fed Apollo and watched him float through his small, perfect world, innocent of the complexity of human hearts. Buster settled at my feet, and for the first time in weeks, I didn't reach for my camera.

That was the riddle, I finally understood. The sphinx hadn't been asking what walks on four legs then two then four. She was asking: *what creature finally learns to stop watching and start living?*