The Riddle at the End of the Scroll

Maya sat in her car outside the abortion clinic, her iPhone lighting up every thirty seconds with messages from Mark. Are you coming home? We need to talk. Please answer.

She'd been taking prenatal vitamins for three months. The bottle sat on her dashboard like a paperweight, pressing down the rising panic in her chest. Mark wanted this baby more than he'd ever wanted anything. He'd already bought tiny socks. He'd researched preschool tuition.

The counselor had told her to make a list. Pros and cons. She'd written: "We're happy. I think. But sometimes I look at him and wonder if I'm looking at a stranger who knows my coffee order."

Her phone buzzed again. Mark was calling. She let it go to voicemail.

The Sphinx at the MET still haunted her dreams from college—a single trip, a single photograph she'd taken of that limestone face, its human head, lion body, the riddle in its eyes. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? She'd always thought the answer was wrong. It wasn't man. It was memory.

Four legs: the clumsy certainty of youth. Two: the terrifying clarity of adulthood. Three: the descent into forgetting.

She opened her vitamin bottle and swallowed three without water.

"You're not ready," her sister had said last night, over wine that tasted like regret. "You're not not-ready either. You're just... suspended."

The iPhone showed Mark's face on the lock screen, smiling from some vacation she couldn't quite place. Was it Cancun? Or had that been someone else's life?

She started the car.

The riddle wasn't about the baby. The riddle was about how you could love someone and still not know them, could sleep beside them every night and still wake up alone. The riddle was about how every choice was also a loss, how saying yes to one future meant saying no to a thousand others.

She drove home. The vitamins sat on the passenger seat like a witness.

Mark was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables with surgical precision. He looked up, his face cracking with relief or fury or something she couldn't read anymore.

"Maya—"

"I kept it," she heard herself say. "I'm keeping it."

She didn't know if it was the truth. She didn't know if she was lying. She only knew that the Sphinx had asked its riddle, and she'd given an answer, and whatever walked on three legs would have to learn to walk on four again.

She took his hand. It felt like holding a stranger's fingers. It felt like home.