The Last Riddle

Lena stands at the baseline of the padel court, her racquet raised like a question mark. The afternoon sun bleeds across the glass walls, turning everything amber. At forty-seven, David should be too old for this — for dating a woman fifteen years his junior, for pretending this could be different. But here he is, bearing the weight of another beginning.

She serves, and the ball clacks against the wall. A sphinx of a woman, Lena. Beautiful, inscrutable, given to riddles she never fully explains. Last Tuesday, over coffee, she'd studied him across the table and said, 'You're still married to her, aren't you? Not legally. In here.' She'd tapped his chest with two fingers. 'You've built a pyramid out of your grief, David. Stone by stone.'

He hadn't denied it. Sarah had been dead three years, and still he woke some mornings reaching for her warmth. Sphinx was the right word — Sarah, too, had been a riddle he'd spent two decades trying to solve, only to lose the answer when the brain tumor came.

'Lena,' he calls now, 'same as last time?'

She smiles, enigmatic. 'Try something new.'

The ball bounces toward him, and he swings. It sails long, clattering against the back fence. He's been bearing the wrong things. Not Sarah's memory — but the belief that loving again is a betrayal. The pyramid Lena mentioned: he's been buried inside it, thinking it was a monument, when it's really just a tomb.

David walks to the net. Lena meets him there, sweat gathering at her temples like pearls.

'You're right,' he says. 'About the pyramid.'

She tilts her head. 'And?'

'I think I'd like to come out now.'

Behind her, through the glass wall, the actual sphinx of Cairo would be invisible in this light. But the one in front of him — this living, breathing sphinx with paint on her fingernails and doubt in her eyes — she's the riddle worth solving.

'Try again,' she says, and tosses him the ball.