Riddles in the Dark

Elena sat at the kitchen table, the spinach salad wilting on her plate like her marriage. Her iPhone buzzed—Marcus again, probably wanting to know if he should pick up his boots. She ignored it. Three weeks separated from his things, his smell, his maddening habit of leaving half-empty coffee mugs on every surface.

The cat, Bast, wound around her ankles, purring like a small engine. Marcus had brought her home as a kitten, a living apology for forgetting their anniversary. Now Bast was Elena's only consistent company, her golden eyes watching with something uncomfortably close to judgment.

"What?" Elena asked the cat. "You think I'm being unreasonable?"

Bast merely blinked and hopped onto the table, sniffing the spinach with disdain.

The irony wasn't lost on her. She'd spent five years playing sphinx to Marcus' riddles—decoded his silences, interpreted his sighs, unraveled the cryptic messages he couldn't simply speak aloud. Love as archaeology. And now here she was, alone with a salad and a judgmental cat, while her phone lit up with notifications like tiny fires she couldn't bring herself to extinguish.

Her thumb hovered over the screen. A text from Marcus: *I found your sphinx moth collection in the garage. Should I bring it over?*

God, she'd forgotten she'd even kept them. She'd collected them in college, those silent dusty-winged creatures that slept by day and flew only in darkness. Another riddle she'd never bothered to solve about herself.

Elena deleted the text without answering. Bast purred louder, pressing her warm flank against Elena's arm. Outside, the last light of day surrendered to purple darkness. Something about the cat's steady, uncomplicated affection made her chest ache.

She pushed the spinach away and picked up the cat instead, burying her face in soft fur that smelled only of itself. No riddles here. Just warmth, weight, the steady rhythm of a heart that asked nothing in return.

For the first time in weeks, Elena didn't feel like a mystery waiting to be solved. She felt like something small and alive, holding on.