Riddle by the Pool

The iPhone lit up the darkened bedroom like a betrayal in miniature. Elena watched the notification flutter across the screen—*You have a new memory*—with a photo that wasn't hers. Some woman laughing, champagne flute raised, lips that had evidently kissed her husband's mouth.

She didn't wake him. Instead, she found herself at the pool at 3 AM, the swimming lanes empty under fluorescent hum. Elena hadn't swum since college, but the water called to her now—something about sinking into silence, letting the world above blur and distort.

She swam until her muscles burned, until her iPhone lay forgotten on a deck chair, its screen glowing with missed calls. But it was the sphinx she couldn't stop looking at—a weathered concrete replica near the garden wall, its lion body crouched in eternal stillness, its human face worn smooth by rain.

The sphinx had no answers. Riddles were its currency, not resolutions. It watched her with hollow eyes as she hauled herself dripping from the pool, shivering in the predawn chill.

"What's the riddle?" she whispered to it. "How do you solve a marriage that's already broken?"

The sphinx said nothing. Elena wrapped herself in a towel and checked her iPhone. Three missed calls from David. Four texts: *Where are you? Are you okay? Please answer.*

His terror was genuine. That was the worst part—he was terrified of losing her, even as he'd already betrayed her. The sphinx's riddle wasn't about truth or lies. It was about the terrible space in between, where love rotted slowly like fruit left too long on the counter.

Elena typed: *I'm at the pool.*

Then deleted it. She deleted everything—the texts, the photo, the notification history. By sunrise, she was swimming again, cutting through water that held no ghosts, while the sphinx watched her with its eternal, inscrutable smile.