The Riddle We Never Answered

I found her at the track again, running laps in the dark. Sarah had been doing this for months—running until her lungs burned, running until the asphalt blurred beneath her feet. She said it cleared her mind. I knew she was running from the conversation we kept avoiding.

"I saw him today," she said later, drinking water on our balcony, her chest still heaving. "At the grocery store. He was buying oatmeal."

Thomas. Her ex-husband. The question mark she'd never fully answered for me, the sphinx in our marriage with its endless riddles: What really happened between them? Why did he leave so suddenly?

I bore the weight of my own suspicions, carrying them like stones in my pockets. Thomas had been charming, successful—everything I wasn't when Sarah and I met. He'd sent her letters for a year after their divorce. She'd burned them, she said, but I'd found the receipts for a post office box she'd kept.

"He looks old," Sarah continued, not meeting my eyes. "His hair's thinning. He asked about you."

"What did you tell him?"

"That we're happy." She finally looked at me, and I saw it—the sphinx's riddle in her expression, something guarded and ancient and impossible to interpret. "Are we, Michael?"

I started to answer—of course we're happy, we built this life together, we have the house, the careers, the comfortable routines—but the words died in my throat. Instead, I found myself running too. Not away from her, but toward something I couldn't name.

A week later, I was five miles outside the city when my phone buzzed. Sarah.

"I'm pregnant," her message read.

I stopped running. The sphinx had spoken, but her answer wasn't the one I'd expected. Standing there on the side of that empty road, I realized that some riddles don't have answers—only new questions that keep you moving forward.

I turned around and started running home.