Riddles by the Pool

The orange sunset bled into the water as Maria sat at the edge of the pool, her legs dangling in the chlorinated blue. At forty-two, she'd finally booked the solo trip her therapist had suggested for years.

She ran her fingers through her hair, now streaked with silver she'd stopped coloring six months ago. The transformation had been Richard's idea—his way of telling her he'd fallen in love with someone younger without actually saying the words.

"You're like a sphinx," he'd told her once, early in their marriage. "Mysterious. Beautiful. But sometimes I feel like I'm solving riddles just to understand you."

Now, twenty years later, she wondered if the riddles had ever been worth solving.

The pool attendant, a boy no older than twenty, brought her another drink. His name was Mateo, and he had the same hungry look Richard had possessed at that age—that mixture of ambition and innocence that made grown women foolish. His eyes lingered on her.

"You look like someone who's solved too many riddles," he said unexpectedly, setting down her orange juice and vodka.

Maria laughed, surprised by his perception. "Or not enough."

The hotel's gardens featured a stone sphinx, its face eroded by decades of sun and rain. Maria had sat beside it each evening, asking it the questions she'd never asked Richard: When did you stop loving me? Was it the children? Was it me? Was it simply time?

The sphinx remained silent, as sphinxes do.

That night, under a moon that turned the pool to silver, Mateo found her again. They didn't touch. They just talked—about his dreams of architecture school, her failed career as a painter, the way regret accumulates like sediment.

"My grandmother says the sphinx asks the questions," Mateo said. "She says the real question isn't what we want. It's what we're willing to lose for it."

Maria watched an orange peel float in the pool, slowly disintegrating. She thought about Richard, about the woman he'd left her for, about the version of herself that had dissolved somewhere along the way.

"Maybe," she said, "the answer is that we're willing to lose everything. And that's the problem."

The sphinx watched from the darkness, its riddle finally answered: The thing that walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in evening isn't a man—it's a marriage.

Maria finished her drink. The water felt warm around her ankles. Tomorrow she would go home. Tomorrow she would sign the papers. But tonight, under the orange moon, she sat perfectly still, teaching herself how to be alone again.