The Last Riddle

The sunset bled orange across the skyline as Maya pressed her forehead against the cold glass of her thirty-fourth floor office. Below, the city churned like a living thing—lights flickering on, traffic streaming in arteries of red and white. She wondered how many of those people were happy. How many were simply

"You're still here?"

She didn't turn. Karl, the sphinx of the mergers department, leaned against her doorframe. He'd earned the nickname years ago—inscrutable, impossible to read, dispensing cryptic wisdom that only made sense in retrospect. His face was a map of intrigues survived, promotions

"Just leaving," Maya said.

"Bull wants that memo on his desk by eight."

Marcus "The Bull" Sterling—managing partner, human battering ram, the man who'd once told her that feelings were like appendixes: unnecessary vestiges of evolution that could

"I know what he wants."

Karl studied her. "You've been here three years, Maya. In another two, you'll be sitting in an office like mine. Or you'll be gone. The question is: which person do you want to be?"

He walked away without waiting for an answer. Typical.

Maya packed her bag. Her phone lit up with a notification from home security: her elderly golden retriever, Barnaby, padding through the living room, pausing at the door exactly as he did every evening around seven. Waiting. She pictured his

She remembered why she'd taken this job in the first place—to afford the apartment with a garden for him to age in dignity. To pay for the chemotherapy that had bought her mother six more months. To prove something to the father who'd left when she

The elevator deposited her in the lobby. Outside, the air smelled of exhaust and pretzels and possibility. An orange peel lay on the sidewalk like a discarded question mark.

She nearly kept walking to the subway. Instead, she turned toward the dog park two blocks away. Barnaby would wait. He always waited. But she needed to sit on a bench and watch strangers throw tennis balls to creatures who loved them unconditionally. She needed to remember that some

Tomorrow she would give The Bull his memo. Tomorrow she would ask Karl what he'd meant. Tomorrow she would decide whether the view from the top was worth the thinning air.

Tonight, she would just watch the last of the orange light fade from the sky and walk home to the only soul who'd never asked her to become someone else.