What She Couldn't Solve

Emma stood in the kitchen of her newly empty apartment, slicing an orange with practiced precision. The citrus scent hit her like memory itself—her mother's kitchen, Sunday mornings before everything fell apart. She was forty-two, and this was her second divorce. The apartment smelled faintly of papaya, rotting in the bowl because she'd forgotten to eat it before leaving for the weekend.

"You need to take more vitamins," David had told her during that last terrible fight, as if supplements could fix what was breaking between them. He'd left a bottle on the counter before walking out. Emma pushed it aside now, watching it teeter near the edge.

Her hair fell in strands she hadn't bothered to cut since the breakup. It was getting too long, catching in her jewelry, tangling when she slept. David had loved her hair long. She should cut it, but something stopped her each time.

The phone buzzed. A text from him: "I left something at your place."

Emma knew what it was even before she found it in the back of the closet—the small sphinx figurine they'd bought in Egypt, on that trip when they still believed love could conquer anything. The sphinx's limestone face was chipped now, its riddle mouth slightly open as if demanding an answer she couldn't provide.

What was the riddle? What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? A human life. But what was the riddle of marriage? What thing begins with passion and ends with strangers?

She traced the sphinx's broken wing with her thumb, thinking of papaya sunsets and vitamin promises and the way his hair had started graying at the temples last year. The orange on her counter was already oxidizing, browning at the edges. Everything rots eventually.

Emma typed back: "Come get it tomorrow."

Then she picked up the phone and made a different call—a salon appointment she'd been avoiding for months. It was time, she realized, to solve the riddle she'd been avoiding all along: the one about how to be whole on her own.