The Midnight Riddle

Sarah stared at the tangled mess of ethernet cable beneath her desk, the neon blue glow of her monitor reflecting off her graying hair. At 47, she'd stopped counting the individual strands that abandoned her scalp each month. The vitamin supplements lined up like soldiers on her desk — D3 for bones, B12 for energy, biotin for the hair that kept leaving anyway.

The office building downtown loomed outside her window in the fog, a glass pyramid of ambition that held thousands of dreams, including the one she'd sacrificed her thirties for. Now, approaching fifty with nothing to show but a corner office and a divorce decree, Sarah found herself asking the kind of questions that usually came after three glasses of wine.

She swiveled her chair to face the new intern, a 22-year-old who regarded her with something uncomfortably close to pity.

"You're still here?" Maya asked, too innocent to understand the question was actually: "Why are you still here?"

Sarah almost laughed. She felt like the Sphinx — a relic from another age, guarding riddles she'd forgotten the answers to, while everyone rushed past her toward futures they couldn't guarantee. The difference was, tourists still paid to see the Sphinx. They only paid Sarah to solve problems they didn't want to think about.

"Just finishing something," Sarah said, and surprised herself by meaning it.

She unplugged the ethernet cable from her laptop for the last time. The vitamin bottles went into her purse. She took one last look at the pyramid in the distance, then walked out into the night, leaving behind the riddle she'd been living inside. For the first time in twenty years, she didn't know where she was going. And for the first time, that was exactly the point.