Riddles in the Dark

The night shift at the museum always ended the same way—Julia standing before the glass case that housed the Sphinx of Hatshepsut, twelve hours of being a glorified zombie weighing on her bones. Her colleague Marcus had already clocked out two hours ago, leaving her with the echoing corridors and the weight of everything she hadn't said.

"You're still running from it," he'd told her earlier that evening, leaning against the break room wall like he owned all the silence between them. "Whatever happened between us."

She hadn't denied it. Some truths were worse than the empty existence she'd been living since David left, taking the mortgage payments and her will to feel anything much at all. Marcus was gentle in ways that scared her—soft-spoken, patient, the kind of man who remembered how she took her coffee after three years of working together. That was precisely the problem.

The sphinx stared back at her now through reinforced glass, its limestone face eroded by millennia, its riddles long forgotten. Julia pressed her palm against the case. What would it ask her if it could speak? What's the creature that walks on four legs at dawn and broken dreams at dusk?

She checked her phone—3:17 AM. Marcus would be asleep by now, or pretending to be. He'd asked her to dinner six times in the past month, and she'd deflected each invitation with practiced ease. Because something that might actually work—that might require showing up with her whole heart, with all her jagged edges and still-raw grief—that was more terrifying than never trying at all.

Her running shoes squeaked against the marble floor as she turned away from the sphinx, toward the exit. Tomorrow she would say yes. Tomorrow she would stop moving through her days like the walking dead, like something half-alive and mostly afraid. Tonight, she would run toward something instead of away.

The museum doors hissed open behind her, and the city waited—alive, uncertain, and full of questions she was finally ready to answer.