Riddles Without Answers

Maria stood in the kitchen at 6 AM, slicing a papaya with surgical precision. The fruit's orange flesh gleamed in the harsh fluorescent light—too bright, too revealing, like everything about this marriage lately.

"You're doing it again," David said from the doorway. He didn't mean the fruit.

"Doing what?"

"That thing where you're present but actually miles away."

Their golden retriever, Barnaby, pressed against Maria's leg, sensing the current running through the room. She'd been doing a lot of running lately—into work, into projects, into anything that wouldn't ask her the question David had been asking for months: Are you still happy here?

The papaya's seeds scattered like dark thoughts. Maria remembered their honeymoon in Egypt, how they'd stood before the Sphinx at dawn, both pretending to understand something profound about eternity and love. David had whispered that riddles were just questions without the courage to be direct.

She'd laughed then. She wasn't laughing now.

"I saw the text," he said quietly.

Her hand froze. The knife hovered over orange segments.

"He's a colleague."

"You deleted the messages."

"Because nothing happened!" Maria's voice cracked. "Because I needed someone to talk to who didn't look at me like I was a problem to be solved."

David's face crumbled. The worst part was that she still loved him—loved how he made coffee exactly how she liked, loved how he slept with his hand on her hip, loved how he'd rescued Barnaby from a shelter three years ago and claimed the dog had saved them both.

Some rescues don't take.

"So what happens now?" he asked.

Barnaby whined, pressing between them. The dog had been running in circles around their dysfunction for months, loyal to both, belonging to neither.

Maria looked at the fruit salad she'd been preparing—papaya and orange, bright and complicated and ultimately insufficient. Some hungers couldn't be satisfied by sweetness alone.

"I don't know," she said. "But I think I need to figure it out alone."

The Sphinx had kept its secrets for four thousand years. Some riddles, she realized, were never meant to be solved—only endured.