Riddle at Dawn

The Great Sphinx watched Elena eat breakfast alone on the hotel terrace, its limestone face eroded by millennia of indifference. She sliced into her papaya, the bright orange flesh yielding to her spoon with wet, sucking sounds. Marcus was out running again—his fourth morning jogging along the Nile while their marriage disintegrated in air-conditioned silence.

"Communication," Dr. Patel had suggested back in London. "A change of scenery."

Egypt had seemed romantic then. Now it was just expensive backdrop.

Elena swallowed the papaya, sweet and cloying. Her phone buzzed—a work email. Subject line: URGENT. The spreadsheet she'd abandoned three days ago. The same spreadsheet that contained the hotel charges on a credit card statement she'd discovered by accident. The Nile Hilton, Cairo, December 12th. The date overlapped with his "consulting trip" to Manchester.

She stood up, her chair scraping stone.

Down at the pool, she slipped into the water. Swimming had always been her thinking place—the rhythmic breathing, the muffled world below the surface. She pushed off from the wall, breaststroke toward the other side, her body cutting through blue chlorinated calm.

What had the sphinx asked its travelers? What walks on four legs, then two, then three? A riddle with one answer, one truth. But marriage wasn't a riddle. It was something with multiple answers, none of them satisfying.

Her strokes slowed. She treaded water in the center of the pool, watching the Sphinx silhouette against the sunrise. Ancient. Patient. Holding secrets.

Behind her, Marcus's footsteps on the terrace.

"Elena?"

She didn't turn.

"We need to talk."

"I know," she said to the water. "I know about Manchester."

Silence stretched between them, longer than the desert.

"I can explain," he said finally.

She swam to the ladder, pulled herself up dripping. The sun was cresting over the Sphinx's shoulders, painting everything gold and unforgiving.

"No riddles," she said, wringing out her hair. "Just truth."