Cable Across the Water

The underwater cable lay somewhere beneath her, a thick black artery pulsing with data across the Atlantic floor. Sarah surfaced, gasping, salt water stinging her eyes. 3 AM at the Rhode Island beach house, and she was swimming alone again.

Inside, Marcus slept—or pretended to. He'd become something sphinx-like over the past year: inscrutable, surrounded by riddles she'd stopped trying to solve. His silence wasn't empty; it was full, like the stone creature's gaze—knowing, withholding, demanding she prove herself worthy of answers he never gave.

"Why are you still here?" he'd asked last night, not with anger but with the calm, terrifying curiosity of a predator toying with its prey.

She treaded water, watching the distant lights of the mainland flicker like dying stars. The cable down there carried millions of conversations: lovers' whispers, business deals, emergencies, ordinary hellos. Somewhere in that current, people were reaching each other.

Marcus's riddle had no right answer. Stay and be slowly erased by his indifference? Leave and lose everything they'd built? The sphinx ate those who couldn't solve its puzzle, but Marcus did something worse—he made her want to keep trying.

She began swimming back to shore, muscles burning, chest tight. The real riddle wasn't why she stayed. It was why she still believed something worth saving existed beneath his surface, why she kept diving down looking for cable in the deep, dark water, hoping to find a connection that might still be alive.

Maybe some sphinxes don't want to be solved. Maybe they just want to watch you drown trying.