Riddle of the Empty Bed

The cat watched from the dresser, its tail flicking with rhythmic judgment. Eleanor counted the strands of gray hair in her brush—seventeen today, three more than yesterday. At forty-three, she felt like a living riddle, answerless and ancient.

Marcus came home smelling of orange blossoms and someone else's perfume. The sphinx lamp they'd bought in Egypt watched from the nightstand, its stone smile frozen in eternal secrets.

"We need to talk," she said, the words foreign in her mouth.

He poured himself whiskey, neat. "About what?"

"About how you haven't looked me in the eye in three months. About how this marriage has become a sphinx's riddle with no solution."

The cat jumped down and rubbed against Marcus's legs, traitor that he was.

"You're imagining things," Marcus said, but his hand shook.

Eleanor opened the drawer where she kept the evidence: orange lipstick on a collar, receipts for dinners she wasn't invited to, a hair that wasn't hers—long and dark, unlike her growing collection of silver strands.

"I found her hair in our bed," she said quietly. "The cat tried to bury it."

Marcus stopped with his glass halfway to his lips. The silence stretched, uncomfortable and thin.

"Her name is Sarah," he whispered. "She's twenty-six. She has no gray hair. She doesn't ask questions."

"She doesn't know you either," Eleanor said, surprising herself with her calm. "But that's what you wanted, isn't it? Someone who doesn't see the riddles."

The sphinx seemed to smile wider in the lamplight.

"You look tired," Marcus said, and something broke in his voice.

"I look forty-three," Eleanor corrected. "I look like someone who finally solved your riddle."

She packed her bag that night, taking only the cat—who had chosen her anyway—and the sphinx lamp. She left the orange blossom cologne on his dresser, left the gray hairs in her brush, left the marriage that had become nothing but questions with no answers.

Somewhere, a sphinx was laughing.