The Last Question

Maya found the cat sitting on her desk at 3 AM, its yellow eyes fixed on the window where lightning fractured the sky. She should have been sleeping—presentation at 9, career hanging by a thread—but grief had other plans. Six months after David's death, insomnia was her new normal.

"You're judging me," she whispered to the cat, a stray that had appeared three weeks ago. David would have laughed. He'd always wanted a cat; she'd always refused. Now here she was, talking to one in the empty apartment they'd spent five years filling with dreams.

The cat leaped gracefully to the bookshelf, landing beside a replica sphinx David had brought back from Egypt. His last trip before the diagnosis. The irony wasn't lost on her—riddles, unanswered questions, the weight of things left unsaid.

She stood, legs trembling, and began running—not away from anything, but toward the mirror in the hallway. David had called her his sphinx, mysterious and guarded. He'd spent years trying to solve her. Now she was trying to solve herself in his absence.

Outside, another flash of lightning illuminated her hollowed features. She looked like a zombie of her former self, going through motions without feeling. Work, eat, sleep (or try to), repeat. Her colleagues noticed. Sarah from accounting had asked, gently, if she was okay. Maya had smiled—the fake one that reached nowhere near her eyes—and said she was fine.

The cat wound around her ankles, purring loudly. In that moment, Maya understood something David had tried to tell her: grief wasn't a problem to solve. It was a landscape to traverse. The sphinx's riddle wasn't "what am I?" but "who am I now?"

She scooped up the cat, feeling its heartbeat against her chest. Fast. Alive. Next to hers, which somehow kept beating too.

"Okay," she said to the empty apartment. "Okay."

The lightning had passed. Dawn would come soon. She'd give the presentation. She'd probably get those looks from her team—the ones that mixed pity with professional distance. Let them.

Maya carried the cat back to bed, finally feeling something besides the weight of absence. Maybe it was hope. Maybe it was just exhaustion. Either way, for the first time in months, she closed her eyes and didn't immediately open them again.