What the Riddle Cost

The fox blinked at me from across the garden—just a flash of rust-colored fur, gone before I could properly register it. That's how it had been with Marcus, too. Quick, beautiful, vanished before I could understand the damage he'd done.

We were at his sister's engagement party, the kind of suffocatingly upscale affair where the spinach tartes were served on slate tiles and everyone's laughter sounded like practiced choreography. I'd stopped eating hours ago. The champagne had gone warm in my glass.

"You look like you're solving a riddle," said Elena, Marcus's ex-wife, appearing beside me at the edge of the infinity pool. The water stretched toward the horizon, a dark mirror catching fragments of starlight and party glow. "Sphinx face."

I hadn't realized I was making any expression at all.

"He told me about you," she continued, her voice low, almost lost beneath the ambient jazz. "When we were married, he'd disappear sometimes. Days at a time. He said he met someone who understood him. Someone who didn't ask questions."

The fox darted past again, closer this time. Its eyes caught the light—amber, watchful, utterly indifferent to us.

"That was me," I said. "The one who didn't ask questions."

"And now?"

I looked at the pool, at my reflection rippling in the dark water. "Now I'm full of questions."

Elena touched my arm, her fingers cool. "He loved you best, you know. In his way."

"His way was disappearing."

"Yes. But you were the one he kept coming back to."

I thought about the nights he'd show up at my door, smelling of rain and other women, his hands shaking as he lit cigarettes I'd stopped buying months ago. How we'd fuck like we were trying to erase something, and how he'd always be gone before morning.

"The riddle," I said, suddenly understanding. "What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening."

"Man."

"No. Marcus."

Elena laughed, and it sounded genuine. "You'll be okay."

The fox reappeared, sat on its haunches, and watched us with something like patience. I realized I was starving. I went inside, piled my plate with spinach and things I couldn't name, and ate standing up in the kitchen while the party swirled around me. When Marcus finally appeared in the doorway, looking wrecked and terrified and exactly like himself, I finished my champagne and didn't say anything at all.