The Sphinx at Home Plate

The **vitamin** regimen started the day after the diagnosis. Twelve pills, morning and night, lined up on the kitchen counter like soldiers in a plastic army. Sarah watched him swallow them with the same grim determination he'd brought to every aspect of their twenty years together—efficient, silent, and increasingly distant.

"How's the presentation coming?" Mark asked without looking up from his coffee.

"Fine." Sarah ran her fingers through her **hair**, still thick and dark at forty-two, unlike the thinning strands that had driven Mark to buy expensive toupees and then, finally, to simply shave his head. "I have to run. Big client meeting."

"Another one." It wasn't a question. Mark's face had become a **sphinx** lately—all smooth surfaces and impossible riddles. He'd withdrawn into himself since the doctors gave him six months, maybe a year. The cancer was eating him from the inside, but the silence between them was doing something worse.

Their son Ethan's **baseball** glove sat on the entryway bench, still dusty from last weekend's game. Ethan was away at college now, coming home weekends to find his parents speaking in shorthand, avoiding the subjects that mattered. Last Sunday, watching from the bleachers, Sarah had wanted to grab Mark's hand during the seventh-inning stretch. Instead, she'd folded her arms and watched him stare at his phone.

"Don't forget the pharmacy," Mark said as she reached for the door. "I'm out of the orange ones."

"I won't."

But she did forget. She forgot for three days straight, and when she finally brought them home, the pills sat untouched on his nightstand. In the end, it didn't matter. The vitamins couldn't fix what was breaking, couldn't solve the riddle of how two people who'd loved each other for decades could suddenly become strangers in the same bed. Some sphinxes, Sarah learned, don't have answers—only questions that echo long after the asking stops.