The Riddle of Empty Rooms

The vitamin bottle sat on her nightstand, a daily reminder of the life she was supposed to be living—forty-two years old and still believing that supplements could fix what was actually a crisis of purpose. Elena swallowed one with lukewarm coffee, the dog-eared page of her passport staring back from where it had fallen weeks ago.

"You look like a sphinx," Marcus had told her once, early on, when she'd lain across his hotel bed, smoke from her cigarette curling toward the ceiling. "Riddling everyone else while you hold all the answers."

That was before. Before he'd packed his life into boxes and left nothing behind but a key on the counter and a dog neither of them had wanted—some impulsive rescue from a shelter that now stared at her with accusing eyes across the silent kitchen.

The pool at the apartment complex was empty at dawn, which was why she went there. Yesterday she'd run into Tom, a friend from college who now worked in corporate something, who'd asked with genuine concern how she was doing, and she'd lied through her teeth about being fine, really, just taking some time, and the worst part was how easily it had come—how practiced her unhappiness had become.

She lowered herself into the water, the cold shocking her awake. The dog whined from the balcony above, and something in her chest cracked open. Maybe Marcus had been right about the sphinx thing—she'd spent so long posing riddles for everyone else that she'd forgotten how to ask them of herself.

The vitamin dissolved somewhere in her stomach, useless as prayer. Elena floated on her back, watching the sky lighten, and finally let herself ask the one question that mattered: what would happen if she stopped waiting for permission to begin again?