Riddles at the Bottom of the Pool

Mara swam laps at 5 AM because the water was the only place her thoughts couldn't catch her. Backstroke, breaststroke, crawl—each stroke a temporary reprieve from the crushing weight of the acquisition, the stock options that had suddenly become worthless, Julian's unread texts lighting up her iPhone like warning flares.

She surfaced near the pool's edge and saw him for the first time. The new VP of Operations, sitting on a deck chair in the predawn gray, fully dressed in a suit that cost more than her first car. He was studying her with what she'd later come to think of as sphinx-like detachment—an inscrutable gaze that seemed to withhold more than it revealed.

"You're swimming in circles," he said, not unkindly. "Most people do that when they're avoiding something."

Mara tread water. "And you're watching people swim before dawn. What does that say about you?"

"That I'm a sphinx, darling." He smiled, and something in his face cracked open. "I ask riddles. I don't answer them."

They fell into something like a routine. Each morning, she'd swim while he watched, sometimes drinking coffee from a thermos, sometimes making phone calls in languages she couldn't identify. He never joined her in the water, and she never asked him to. There was something suspended between them, a question neither wanted to articulate.

Two weeks before the merger deadline, her iPhone buzzed with a message from Julian: I'm getting married. She stared at the screen until the words blurred, then plunged into the pool and swam until her arms burned.

When she finally emerged, the sphinx was still there. He set down his coffee.

"You know," he said, "the riddle of the sphinx wasn't about the answer. It was about who was worthy of asking."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I've been sitting here for three weeks waiting for you to ask me why."

"Why what?"

"Why I hired you when everyone else said you were damaged goods." He stood up, finally. "Why I'm about to torch this merger because some spreadsheet jockey thinks your division is expendable." His phone buzzed. He looked at it, then back at her. "Why I haven't kissed you yet, despite every professional instinct I have screaming at me not to."

Mara stood there dripping, heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. The water behind her was still dark. Her iPhone lit up with another notification, another distraction, another escape route.

She let it sink to the bottom of the pool instead.