The Riddle in Your Hand

The palm reader's shop smelled of incense and deferred dreams. Maya sat across from the woman with the weary eyes, extending her right hand.

"I see a crossroads," the woman said, tracing the lines on Maya's palm. "But you already knew that."

Maya thought of the cardboard boxes in her apartment, half-packed with seven years of shared life. Daniel had left two weeks ago—no explosions, no dramatic declarations, just the quiet erosion of two people growing in different directions. The cat, Barnaby, kept patrolling the empty spots where Daniel's bookshelves used to be.

"What else?" Maya asked.

"A sphinx's riddle." The reader's nail caught on Maya's heart line. "Sometimes the answer destroys you. Sometimes not knowing saves you."

That evening, Maya sat on her balcony with an orange, peeling it in one long strip like her mother used to do. The citrus spray stung her eyes. She watched the sunset stain the sky that impossible shade between coral and bruised peach—orange, the color of endings that insist on being beautiful.

Barnaby leapt onto her lap, purring like a small engine. Cats never questioned their worth. They simply existed, demanding love on their own terms. Daniel used to joke that Barnaby had more emotional intelligence than both of them combined.

"What's the riddle, Barnaby?" she whispered into his fur. "What am I supposed to solve?"

The sphinx had asked Oedipus: what walks on four legs, then two, then three? The answer was man, and the knowing had cost him everything. Maya's riddle was simpler and more cruel: what do you do when you've built a life that no longer fits the person you've become?

She popped an orange segment into her mouth. Sweet. Sharp. Alive.

The phone buzzed—Daniel, asking if she wanted to meet for coffee, talk about "closure." Closure was a myth. Life didn't close; it just kept opening into rooms you hadn't expected.

Maya pressed her palm against the glass door, her own lifeline pressing back against her. Not a crossroads anymore. She'd already chosen. The answer wasn't in someone else's prediction or a shared apartment or the pieces of a person she used to be.

"No riddles," she said to the empty room, to Barnaby's inscrutable gold eyes. "Just this."

The orange sunset deepened into twilight. Tomorrow she would finish packing. Tomorrow was soon enough.