The Riddle After Midnight

The summer storm broke just as Marcus returned, lightning fracturing the sky like something trying to escape. Elena stood on the balcony of their beachfront rental, watching the ocean churn. Behind her, the heavy wooden door clicked shut.

"You're still taking them," he said, not a question. The vitamin bottle on the nightstand—prescription strength, shaped like pearls—caught the light from the streetlamp below.

"They're placebos," she said, which was half true. The other half was that she needed something to believe in.

Marcus leaned against the doorframe, shirtless, his chest rising and falling like he'd been swimming upstream. Three years of marriage and he still looked at her as if she were a sphinx perched on some impossible ledge, all riddle and no answer. The thing about riddles, Elena thought, is that someone always has to lose.

"My mother called," he said. "She wants us for Thanksgiving."

The rain began in earnest, warm and heavy. She remembered their honeymoon in Greece, the way he'd traced the life line on her palm and promised everything. Now she wondered if palmistry was just another way of lying to yourself about what's already written.

"I can't go back there," Elena said. "Not after last time."

"Because of what she said about us having children?"

"Because she looked right through me, Marcus. Like I was something she'd ordered but couldn't return."

He crossed the room and took her hand, his thumb finding that same line he'd traced three years ago. His palm was rough, calloused from work he loved. She thought about swimming out too far, about the point where you either turn back or keep going until land disappears.

"I take the vitamins because I'm afraid I'm forgetting how to want things," she said, the words escaping before she could stop them. That was the riddle, finally spoken aloud.

Lightning struck again, closer this time. For a moment, everything was illuminated—the rumpled bed, the prescription bottle, the two of them standing at the edge of something neither could name.

Marcus pulled her into the rain. "Then let's start wanting something new."

And there, on that balcony in the downpour, Elena understood that sphinxes don't give answers. They wait for you to stop asking.