The Last Question

The dinner party had been dragging on for hours, the kind where everyone drinks too much to avoid saying what they actually mean. Sarah felt like a zombie moving through the motions—refilling wine glasses, laughing at jokes she'd heard a dozen times before, touching David's arm when he spoke as if she still found him charming rather than exhausting.

Outside, lightning split the sky, and she watched through the sliding glass door as the storm crept closer across the valley. They'd been married seven years, and she'd stopped asking herself when it had started feeling like performance art. Maybe it was when David got promoted and stopped coming home for dinner. Maybe it was when she realized she preferred the company of her own thoughts to his.

The cable box blinked in the corner—one of those outdated arrangements they kept meaning to cancel but never did, like so many things between them.

"So," Maya said from across the table, settling back with her wineglass. She was David's colleague, sharp-eyed and uncomfortably perceptive, the only person at the table who seemed to notice the silence that lived underneath their conversation. "Here's something I've been wondering about you two."

Sarah straightened. She'd always hated the way Maya looked at them, like they were a puzzle she couldn't quite solve.

"If you knew you couldn't fail," Maya said, "what would you be doing right now? Not tomorrow, not next year. Right this second."

David opened his mouth, closed it. Sarah felt something loosen in her chest—the way it did when you finally let go of something you'd been carrying too long.

The question hung there like riddle from the sphinx, ancient and merciless. Answer right, or everything dies. Answer wrong, or maybe that would be worse.

"I'd be in the water," Sarah heard herself say. "Somewhere deep enough that I couldn't see the bottom."

David turned to look at her for the first time all evening. Lightning flared again, closer now, and in the sudden illumination she saw his face—really saw it—as if for the first time in years.

"I'd be alone," he said quietly. "Finally."

And just like that, the zombie stopped moving. The performance ended. The sphinx had her answer after all.