Questions Without Answers

Elena had always found something perverse about how quietly the world continued after Marco died. The city hummed with its usual indifference, and here she was, three months later, standing before a limestone sphinx in the climate-controlled basement of the museum, trying to determine if the faint crack along its jawline had widened since last week.

"What are you asking me?" she whispered to it, as she did most mornings. The sphinx offered its eternal silence — that arrogant, ancient confidence that some questions were meant to remain unanswered. Like why Marco's heart had simply stopped during his sleep. Like why she'd woken up that morning with the strange certainty that something was wrong.

The museum's resident cat, a scarred tom that the guards had christened Ramses, wound himself around her ankles. He'd taken to following her through the galleries since Marco's funeral, as if he'd been assigned some feline duty of witness. Elena had never been particularly fond of cats — Marco was the one who'd wanted one — but she found herself breaking off pieces of her turkey sandwich for him now, grateful for something that demanded nothing and offered only calibrated warmth.

At six, when the other conservators packed their instruments and headed home to families or lovers or empty apartments that felt less haunted than hers, Elena drove to the community pool. She swam sixty laps, back and forth, counting the strokes until her arms burned and her thoughts dissolved into the rhythm of her own breathing. In the water, weightless and suspended, she could almost believe that grief was something you could outdistance, something that might lose interest if you just kept moving.

Tonight, emerging from the locker room with wet hair plastered to her skull, she found Ramses waiting by her car. He blinked slowly at her in the parking lot floodlights, then padded toward her and butted his head against her calf.

"You're not him," she told him, crouching down anyway. The cat purred against her palm, a sound like a tiny engine.

But Ramses wasn't trying to be Marco. Ramses was simply a creature who knew about hunger and satisfaction and showing up. Maybe that was enough. Maybe the sphinx had been asking the wrong question all along — not what she'd lost, but what she might still choose to feed.

Elena straightened up, shivering in the cooling air, and opened the car door. Ramses followed her home, and for the first time in months, the apartment didn't feel like a tomb when she walked inside.