The Weight of Unasked Questions

The sphinx stared at us from across the conference room, its limestone face frozen in that eternal, inscrutable smile. Dr. Helena Morales was pointing at the projection screen, going on about symbolic riddles in ancient funerary rites, but I couldn't focus. I was too aware of Thomas sitting three rows ahead, the sharp line of his shoulders, the way he kept running his thumb over his wedding band—our old signal, back when we were something more than colleagues, back when we were everything to each other.

We hadn't spoken since the miscarriage. Since the hospital corridor where he'd said he couldn't bear it, couldn't bear the possibility of trying again, couldn't bear me with my hollowed-out body and desperate hope. He'd chosen order over chaos. I'd chosen grief over comfort.

"The sphinx doesn't ask questions," Helena was saying. "It threatens. It demands. But what it really wants is for you to acknowledge that some things cannot be solved."

Thomas turned then. Our eyes caught across the rows of chairs. He looked exhausted in that way sleep doesn't fix—drawn thin by something eating him from the inside. I'd heard through mutual friends that his wife had left him. That he'd bought the old lakeside cabin we used to talk about, the one with the bear that raided the trash bins every autumn.

Later, outside the hotel, he found me smoking against the brick wall. "I still think about her," he said, not hello, not how are you, just this blunt admission that cracked something open in my chest. "What we would have named her."

"Elara," I said, and watched his face fracture. "We were going to name her Elara."

He stepped closer, and I could smell the scotch on his breath, see the gray in his temples that hadn't been there three years ago. "I was wrong, Maya. About everything. I thought I was protecting myself from pain, but I just... I just broke us instead."

The sphinx's riddle echoed in my head: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening. The answer was man, but the real question was about bearing weight—about how we carry what we've lost, how we transform under the crushing gravity of our own choices.

"I can't be your friend," I said, and his face crumpled. "Not after everything. But I don't want to hate you anymore."

He nodded, swallowing hard. "I'll take it. For now."

As I walked back to my room, I realized the sphinx had been wrong. Some questions do have answers. They're just not the ones we want to hear.