Running from Riddles

Elena's breath formed white clouds in the freezing predawn air as she ran down Lake Shore Drive, her sneakers slapping rhythmically against the pavement. Three months since she'd blown the whistle on the intricate pyramid scheme that had made her firm millions, three months since her colleagues had stopped answering her calls, three months of running—not just the physical kind, but the deeper, more exhausting kind of running from what she'd done.

She slowed to a walk near the Egyptian exhibit at the museum, its glass pyramid entrance catching the first orange light of dawn. Inside, she knew, sat the sphinx statue she'd visited weekly since everything fell apart. Something about its worn limestone face, its inscrutable smile, its riddles posed to travelers who couldn't pass—her lawyer, her former boss, the investigators who kept asking questions she wasn't ready to answer.

"What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?"

She'd asked herself that riddle a thousand times. The answer was supposed to be man—crawling, walking, leaning on a cane. But Elena knew better now. The answer was betrayal. It crawled in unnoticed, stood tall in its power, and eventually required support to stay upright.

Her phone buzzed. Unknown number. Again.

She didn't need to answer to know it was them—the sphinx's latest riddle, the pyramid's ghost still hungry for more victims. Elena turned away from the museum and started running again, toward the airport, toward a new city, toward whatever version of herself she'd become next. Some riddles weren't meant to be solved. Some sphinxes weren't meant to be answered. Sometimes you just kept running.