The Last Riddle

Maya sat on the balcony of her third-floor walkup, the screen of her iphone glowing in the dusk as she scrolled through photos of a life that no longer felt like hers. David had left three weeks ago, taking the dog—a Golden Retriever named Buster who had been her companion through seven years of graduate school and three miscarriages. The divorce papers would arrive any day.

She'd come to Cairo on a research grant, escaping the empty rooms of their Chicago apartment. Below her balcony, the city roared with motorbikes and street vendors, but here in the borrowed flat of a colleague on sabbatical, there was only the hum of the air conditioner and her own thoughts.

Tomorrow she would stand before the Great Sphinx for the first time, this creature who had watched empires rise and fall, who had asked its riddles to anyone who would listen for forty-five hundred years. What did it know of heartbreak? What riddles had it posed to the lovers who came before her?

Her phone buzzed. David.

"Buster's sick," his voice came through the speaker, thin and worried. "They think it's cancer. He's asking for you."

Maya pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the balcony door. The sphinx had guarded its secrets for millennia, but some riddles weren't meant to be solved alone. Some answers required witnesses.

She booked the midnight flight.