The Riddle We Never Asked

Maya sat at the kitchen counter, the amber plastic vial of prenatal vitamins mocking her from the edge of her cereal bowl. Three years of trying. Three years of hope cycling with disappointment, measured out in daily doses of folic acid and iron. Marcus walked past, already adjusting his baseball cap—the worn navy one he'd worn since college—against the morning sun.

'You taking those?' he asked, not really waiting for an answer.

'Every morning,' she said, though she hadn't. Not for a week.

The museum fundraiser was that evening—Marcus's firm's biggest night of the year. She spent three hours on her appearance, choosing a vintage cloche hat with delicate beading that framed her face like something from another era. When she stepped into the living room, Marcus didn't look up from his phone.

'Nice,' he mumbled, still tapping.

At the museum, she wandered away from his conversations about mergers and acquisitions. She found herself alone before the Egyptian exhibit, staring at a small limestone sphinx. The creature's human face wore that same enigmatic smile—the one that had captivated archaeologists for centuries. The riddle it posed went deeper than Oedipus's: what creature walks on four legs, then two, then three?

She thought about Marcus, whose dreams had crystallized into something monolithic and unyielding. She thought about herself, suspended between the woman she was and the mother she might never become. The sphinx's smile seemed to widen, as if it knew something she didn't.

'Beautiful, isn't it?'

She turned. A stranger—maybe fifty, silver-haired, with eyes that actually saw her. 'My late wife brought me here every year,' he said. 'She said the sphinx reminded her that some questions matter more than answers.' He paused. 'I'm Daniel, by the way.'

'Maya.'

They talked for an hour. About everything and nothing. About how parenthood had become a project for her and Marcus—complete with spreadsheets and ovulation apps—rather than something organic and terrifying and real.

When she found Marcus again, he was still standing in the same circle of men, telling the same story about his college baseball days. The same anecdote he'd told a thousand times.

'There you are,' he said. 'I was wondering where you'd wandered off to.'

Maya touched the brim of her hat. She thought about the vitamins she'd stopped taking. About the sphinx's riddle, which wasn't about how many legs you walked on, but about how you held yourself upright when everything you wanted kept slipping through your fingers.

'I'm right here,' she said, and for the first time in years, it wasn't a lie.