The Spinach Riddle

The restaurant was too loud, or maybe Eleanor was just tired of pretending. Across the table, David was laughing at something his colleague said — that throaty, performative laugh that used to make her fall in love, now just made her feel hollow.

She pushed at the spinach on her plate. The waiter had called it "baby spinach with orange reduction" when he set it down, as though giving it a pedigree made it less depressing. Green and orange, like some holiday gone wrong.

"Everything okay with your meal, El?" David asked, suddenly present, his hand covering hers on the table. His thumb traced her knuckle — practiced, automatic. Choreographed intimacy.

"Fine. Just not very hungry."

"You're always not hungry lately." He didn't say it like an accusation. He said it like he was stating a fact about the weather. That was worse, somehow. The sphinx had offered her riddles with more passion than David offered her anything now.

She thought about their wedding day, two years ago. She'd worn orange — a bold choice, everyone said. Vibrant. Alive. The woman in those photographs felt like a stranger now. Eleanor couldn't remember the last time she'd felt vibrant. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt anything, really, except this low-grade hum of dissatisfaction that never quite resolved into something she could name.

"The spinach is actually good," David said, his fork already halfway to his mouth. "You should try it."

She wanted to scream: I'm not eating because I'm not hungry, David. I'm not eating because nothing tastes like anything anymore, including you. Including us. Including the life we built that looks perfect from the outside and feels like dying from the inside.

Instead she said: "Maybe in a bit."

The sphinx's riddle had been: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? The answer was man. Eleanor's riddle was worse: What woman sits across from a man who loves her enough to notice she's not eating, but not enough to ask why? What woman stays?

She squeezed David's hand back, once, brief and hard, before pulling away to reach for her wine. His face flickered — something unrecognizable passing behind his eyes — before he turned back to his colleague's story about office politics.

The spinach sat untouched on her plate. The orange reduction congealed. Outside, the sunset burned orange against the darkening sky, beautiful and indifferent.

Eleanor took a sip of wine and didn't answer the riddle yet. But she would.