The Riddle of Empty Apartments

Elena moved through her Monday mornings like a zombie—mechanical, gray, something that had once been alive but now only went through the motions. The espresso machine hissed at her as if it knew something she didn't. The bus ride passed in a blur of sleep deprivation and half-remembered dreams about the life she used to have.

Her boss, Marcus, sat in his corner office like a sphinx—enigmatic, imposing, prone to asking impossible riddles in the form of vague feedback. "Find me something authentic, Elena," he'd say, his fingers steepled. "Something that bleeds." She'd spent three years trying to solve him, to understand what he actually wanted, but Marcus remained a monument to her own professional stagnation.

The apartment greeted her each evening with a terrible quiet. Her cat, Minerva, would blink slowly from the windowsill, those golden eyes judgmental. "He's not coming back," the cat seemed to say. Minerva had been David's idea, a compromise when Elena wanted a dog. Now the cat was her only witness to the unraveling.

The dog appeared on a Tuesday, three weeks after David left for good. A golden retriever mix, sitting on her doorstep like it had always belonged there. Elena stepped around it, keys jangling, and the dog simply followed her inside. It curled up on David's side of the bed and didn't leave.

"You can't stay," she told it, but she was already crying.

The dog, she named him Riddle, forced her to be alive again. Walk at dawn. Food in the bowl. The steady warmth of another living thing pressed against her in the night. Minerva tolerated him with regal disdain.

Friday morning, Marcus summoned her to his sphinx-like chamber. "Your work lately," he said, studying his fingernails. "It's different."

Elena felt something crack open in her chest. "I'm getting a divorce."

Marcus looked up, his expression unreadable. "Good," he said. "Now find me something that bleeds."

She walked out of his office and didn't look back. The zombie was gone. She had a dog to walk, a cat to feed, and an entire life to figure out how to live again.