The Sphinx at 3 AM

The cable box flickered, casting blue light across Maria's face as she sat on the couch, her cat Bastet curled against her thigh. It was 3:14 AM — the sphinx hour, when everything became a riddle she couldn't solve.

Her phone lay dark on the coffee table. David's last message still burned in her memory: "I think we need different things."

On screen, a zombie movie played. The creatures shuffled through what looked like downtown Seattle. David had lived there before they met. She wondered which building had been his apartment, which coffee shop he'd mentioned in that story about his early twenties, the one that made her laugh so hard she'd cried.

"He said he loved me," she whispered to Bastet. The cat's golden eyes remained inscrutable.

David had been like a sphinx himself — calm, mysterious, asking questions that seemed simple but weren't. "What do you really want?" he'd ask, fingers trailing down her arm. "Where do you see yourself in five years?" The riddles had seemed romantic then. Now they felt like something else entirely.

She clicked through channels. A baseball game from 1998, rerun on some nostalgia network. The crowd's roar swelled and faded. She remembered sitting in her father's living room, watching the World Series, the way he'd explained each play with patient enthusiasm. He'd been gone three years now.

Her phone lit up. David.

Maria's thumb hovered over the screen. The zombie movie's protagonists fought their way through another herd of undead, struggling toward something that looked like hope. She felt like one of them lately — moving through days that felt somehow not quite alive, pretending everything was fine.

She didn't answer. Instead, she turned off the cable. The room went dark, illuminated only by streetlights filtering through the blinds.

Bastet shifted, purring against her ribs. The vibration grounded her. Some riddles weren't meant to be solved in the middle of the night.

"Sleep," she told herself. "Just sleep."

But as she closed her eyes, David's voice echoed in her memory: "What are you afraid of?"

The sphinx's question, finally answered: she was afraid of waking up alone.