The Riddle in the Window

Elena pressed her forehead against the cold glass of her thirty-fourth floor office, watching the city blur below like a watercolor painting left out in the rain. Three months after Marcus's funeral, and she still couldn't decide which was worse: the sudden silence of their apartment or the way well-meaning colleagues looked at her with that practiced sympathy, as if grief were something you could schedule between meetings.

Her phone buzzed. A text from David, the architect she'd been seeing for three weeks—long enough to be excited, short enough that she hadn't told him about Marcus yet. *Coffee at 4?*

She spotted it then: a cat crouched on the fire escape outside her window, golden eyes fixed on her with an unnerving intensity. It reminded her of the sphinx they'd seen in Egypt years ago—how Marcus had joked that the ancient monument was probably just lonely for conversation, asking riddles to anyone who'd listen. "What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?" he'd quoted, squeezing her hand. "Man, moving through the stages of life. But what about the parts that don't fit the riddle?"

The cat meowed, scratching at the glass. Elena blinked. When had she started crying?

She opened the window a crack. The cat slipped inside, weaving between her legs with an insistence that felt almost like judgment. On her desk sat Marcus's old fedora, the one she couldn't bring herself to move. The cat jumped onto her desk, circled the hat twice, and settled beside it like a guardian.

Her phone buzzed again. David. Then her boss, asking about the quarterly report. Then her mother, checking in.

The sphinx had asked her riddle to passersby for millennia, and still they kept coming, kept trying, kept dying. Maybe that was the point. Maybe the riddle wasn't something you solved—it was something you survived.

Elena typed back to David: *Yes. 4 works.*

Then she texted her mother: *I'm doing okay. Really.*

She reached for the hat, hesitated, then put it on. The cat purred. Outside, the city kept moving, and for the first time in months, Elena thought she might be ready to move with it.