Riddles in the Afternoon

Maya stood before the bathroom mirror, the fluorescent light casting harsh shadows across her face. At thirty-seven, she'd never felt more like a riddle without an answer. The Sphinx of her life—Marcus, with his impossible questions and conditional love—had finally moved out three days ago, taking the dog but leaving his collection of expired vitamin bottles on the counter.

She opened the cabinet and stared at them: Vitamin D for the depression he swore she didn't have, B-complex for stress he said she invented, omega-3s for a brain he claimed never worked right. Each bottle a small monument to his gaslighting. She swept them into the trash can, the plastic clattering like fallen dominoes.

The doorbell rang.

It was Clara from down the hall, holding a leash. "Buster's been whining at your door since Marcus left," she said, thrusting the dog toward her. "He wouldn't eat. Said to tell you he misses his person."

The dog—old, arthritic, smellier than she remembered—licked her hand with desperate enthusiasm. Maya's throat tightened. Marcus had taken everything else: the furniture, the savings, her confidence. But he'd miscalculated. The dog's loyalty wasn't to him. It was to whoever filled the bowl, whoever sat on the floor rubbing his belly during Netflix binges, whoever cried into his fur when the Sphinx asked another impossible riddle: *If you really loved me, why do you need your own life?*

She fed the dog a real meal for the first time in days. Then she opened a new bottle of vitamins—her own, from the drugstore run she'd made that morning. Vitamin D, because sunlight alone couldn't fix what three years of emotional erosion had done.

The Sphinx had been defeated, she realized. Not by answering his riddles correctly, but by refusing to play anymore. She scratched the dog behind the ears, and for the first time in three years, the riddles stopped whispering from the corners of the room. The answer had been there all along: she was the one who got to ask the questions now.