Riddles in the Gallery

The hat was charcoal felt, wide-brimmed and deliberately provocative—exactly the kind of thing Eleanor would wear to her ex-husband's opening. She adjusted it in the gallery reflection, watching Mark across the room, his hand possessively on the shoulder of a woman half their age. The sphinx loomed behind them in the photograph, stone lips sealed in eternal silence, much like the marriage that had ended sixteen months ago.

Her phone buzzed in her palm. Not her iPhone—that was safely tucked in her clutch, its camera dark. This was the burner, the one she'd used when Mark's firm had hired a private investigator to follow her during the divorce. 'He's lying about the provenance,' the text read. 'The 1922 excavation papers are forged.'

Eleanor had become something of a spy herself in the aftermath. Not the glamorous kind—no martinis or exotic locales. Just a curator who'd learned that provenance research meant learning to spot the lies people told about objects they'd spent fortunes acquiring. The pyramid photograph on the opposite wall cast sharp shadows across her face as she moved closer to Mark's cluster of admirers.

'Ele,' Mark said, turning too smoothly. 'I wasn't sure you'd come.' His smile didn't reach his eyes. 'You remember Sarah, from the London office.'

'The provenance specialist,' Eleanor said, shaking Sarah's hand. 'I saw your paper in Antiquity. Outstanding work on the Amarna letters.' She let the implication hang: Sarah was too competent to miss what Mark was doing.

Mark's jaw tightened. 'The Egyptian collection is expanding. We're acquiring something remarkable next month.'

'Really?' Eleanor positioned herself where Mark couldn't see her screen. 'Do tell.'

But she was already typing on the burner: 'He's acquiring something next month. Probably the Djedkarë stela. Check the 1922 papers again.' She sent it, then slipped the phone into her pocket and picked up a champagne flute. 'To new acquisitions,' she said, raising her glass toward the sphinx photograph, its inscrutable gaze meeting hers across three thousand years and the wreckage of a marriage she'd finally learned to stop trying to understand.