What the Riddle Asks

Marissa stood on her balcony in Miami, the neon **orange** glow of the hotel sign bleeding into the humid night. Her palm pressed against the railing, leaving a sweat-print that would vanish before morning. Inside, Jack's suitcase sat open like a mouth waiting to be fed.

"You're being a **bull** about this," he'd said earlier, his voice thick with that particular frustration that only comes when love has curdled into habit. "You charge at everything headfirst. Maybe some questions aren't meant to be answered."

He was right, mostly. She was stubborn—had been since she was twenty-two and certain the world would yield to sheer momentum. Now at thirty-seven, the momentum had mostly exhausted itself against walls she refused to see until her nose was broken.

Her phone buzzed. It was Jim, her brother. "Found him," he wrote. "Mom's old **dog**, Buster. He's at a shelter in Fort Lauderdale. Someone adopted him three years ago, but they died last month. He's fifteen, Marissa. He doesn't have much time."

Marissa stared at the message. She hadn't thought about Buster in a decade. The **sphinx** of her childhood—silent, inscrutable, sleeping at the foot of her bed through every nightmare, every breakup, every morning-after breakfast where she picked at her toast while her mother told her she was too emotional, too much, too everything.

Jack had packed enough for three days. He'd be back. He always came back.

But maybe some riddles weren't meant to be solved. Maybe the sphinx didn't actually have an answer—maybe the point was standing before it, witness to your own insufficient understanding, until you learned to live in the not-knowing.

Marissa typed back: "I'll be there at dawn."

Inside, she zipped Jack's suitcase closed. Some loves, some riddles, you walk away from. Others—you drive toward.