The Riddle in the Departure Lounge

The departure lounge's glass wall reflected her tired expression as she clutched her iphone like a lifeline. Three unread messages from David. Three chances to explain what had happened between them, and she'd taken none of them.

She'd spent the morning wandering through the British Museum's Egyptian collection, as if the ancient stone sphinx could somehow give her the answer she needed. The statue's worn face had stared back impassively, its riddles long eroded by time, leaving only silence and the weight of three thousand years of human disappointment.

Her phone buzzed again. She didn't look.

"You're full of bull, Elena." David's words from last night still stung. They'd been arguing about his promotion, about how he was never home, about how she'd found the receipts for hotel rooms she'd never visited. He'd called her paranoid, controlling, unreasonable. She'd called him a liar.

The sphinx had asked travelers a riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? The answer was humanity itself — crawling, walking upright, then leaning on a cane in old age. But her riddle was simpler, and harder: What do you do when the person you love becomes someone you no longer recognize?

Her iphone lit up with a fourth message. She touched the screen, her finger hovering over David's name.

The gate announcement echoed through the terminal. Flight 207 to Rome now boarding.

She stood up, leaving the sphinx's unanswered questions behind in the quiet museum, the bull still unresolved between them, and walked toward the gate without reading the messages. Some riddles, she decided, don't have answers — only next steps.