Asking the Wrong Questions

The Great Sphinx watched them from across the resort pool, its limestone face eroded by millennia of indifference. Sarah lay on a chaise lounge, thumb scrolling through her iPhone as if the answers to their disintegrating marriage might be found in someone else's vacation photos. The screen reflected against her sunglasses—blue light bathing eyes that refused to meet his.

"You're doing it again," Daniel said, setting his drink on the mosaic table. The condensation pooled beneath the glass like his patience, slowly evaporating.

"Doing what?" She didn't look up.

"That thing. Where you're somewhere else entirely. Egypt wasn't your idea, remember?"

"Egypt was your midlife crisis, Dan. I'm just along for the panic attacks."

He adjusted his Panama hat, shielding eyes that had suddenly grown too bright. "I thought we could—"

"What? Rediscover ourselves? Find the magic again?" She finally locked eyes with him. "We've been asking the wrong questions."

An old woman passed by, trailing incense and the scent of cardamom. She offered to read Sarah's palm, wrinkled fingers moving like desert roots. "Your heart line," the woman said, "it forks in two directions."

Sarah pulled her hand away. "I know."

Later that night, in their hotel room with its view of the Sphinx's shadow stretching toward them like an accusation, Daniel found himself alone. Sarah's iPhone sat on the bedside table, dark and silent. Her bag was gone. On the pillow, a note in handwriting he'd watched her practice for their wedding invitations eighteen years ago: *I'm going home to find the right questions.*

He sat on the balcony, nursing warm whiskey, and watched tourists pose with the monument under floodlights. The Sphinx had been asking riddles for 4,500 years. Daniel finally understood: the trick wasn't solving them. It was realizing some questions were designed never to be answered.