Riddles in the Dark

The iPhone buzzed against the nightstand — 3:14 AM. Elena's third text this hour. He didn't need to read it to know what it said. Same question, different words: *Are you coming home?*

Marcus sat on the edge of the bed, his palm sweating against his knee. Forty-two years old and he felt like a teenager sneaking out, though there was no one to sneak from anymore. The baseball tickets from last season — the ones Elena had surprised him with, front row behind the dugout — sat in the drawer where he'd shoved them after the game. That night, watching the players high-five and spit seeds, he'd realized he didn't know the woman beside him anymore. Maybe he never had.

"What's the riddle?" she'd asked in the car, sensing his distance. "You're like the sphinx lately, Marcus. Nothing gets through."

The sphinx. She'd always loved mythology. But there was no heroic answer to what had died between them, no Oedipus to solve the thing. Just the slow erosion of two lives that once fit together.

Now his iPhone lit up again. Not a text this time — her name on an incoming call.

Marcus's thumb hovered over decline. He could leave. He'd packed a bag earlier, stashed it in the trunk of his car. A fresh start, whatever that meant at forty-two. The palm of his hand tingled, that strange physical manifestation of his own cowardice.

The ringing stopped. A voicemail notification bloomed on the screen.

He pressed play.

"I know you're awake," Elena's voice came through, small but steady. "I found the receipt from the hotel. Last Tuesday." A pause. "I'm not asking where you were. I'm asking if you're coming back to the marriage. If you're not... say it. Just say it and I'll stop calling."

Marcus sat with the phone in his hand, the baseball tickets in the drawer, the ghost of whatever love they'd made hanging in the room like old smoke. The sphinx's riddle, finally, stripped to its bones: not *what* walks on four legs then two then four, but *who* gets to decide when the walking is done.

He didn't call back. He didn't decline. He just sat there as his phone went dark, watching the first light of dawn trace the outline of a life he couldn't quite bring himself to leave or keep.