The Riddle of Empty Rooms

Elena pressed the felt hat down over her silver-streaked hair and caught her reflection in the gallery window. At forty-seven, she'd learned that mourning came in waves—some days tsunami, others ripple. Three years since Marcus left, and she still organized her Saturdays like he might walk through the door.

The museum was closing. She shouldered her bag, heavy withunfinished work, and stopped dead.

The sphinx exhibit was occupied.

A man stood before the limestone creature, head tilted like he was decoding its silence. His overcoat was expensive, his posture weary—the look of someone who'd solved too many riddles and found no answers at their center.

"They say she asked the right question," the man said without turning. "But nobody remembers what it was."

Elena stepped closer. The sphinx's limestone face, eroded by millennia, wore the same inscrutable expression she'd seen in the mirror after Marcus packed his boxes.

"Maybe there was no question," she said. "Maybe she just waited for someone to see her."

The man turned then, and his eyes were the color of storm clouds over the Mediterranean. "That's the loneliest thing I've ever heard."

"Is it?" Elena touched the hat brim, suddenly self-conscious. "I have a dog who waits by the window. My neighbor's cat sleeps on my welcome mat like she's keeping watch. They don't ask questions either."

He smiled, and it transformed his face from weary to something luminous. "I'm David."

"Elena."

"Would you like to get coffee?" He gestured toward the sphinx. "She can wait. She's been waiting three thousand years."

Outside, the city hummed with lives overlapping and pulling apart. Elena thought of her empty apartment, the dog who'd greet her with desperate joy, the cat who'd deign to acknowledge her existence. She thought of riddles without answers and rooms that stayed empty because you forgot how to fill them.

"Yes," she said, and something in her chest unclenched. "Yes, I would."

The sphinx watched them go, limestone eyes holding whatever secret she'd kept all these centuries—that sometimes the answer wasn't a question at all, but simply someone standing beside you in the dark.