The Riddle After Midnight

The sphinx beside the infinity pool stared at him with enigmatic limestone eyes, its riddle worn smooth by three thousand years of silence. Marcus adjusted his father's old baseball cap—faded blue Dodgers memorabilia now stained with sweat and grief—and signaled the waiter for another drink.

She'd left him exactly forty-seven days ago. Their fifteenth anniversary trip to Cabo, now a solo reservation at an Egyptian-themed resort. The cosmic joke wasn't lost on him.

"Room service, señor." The waiter placed a plate of wilted spinach at his elbow. "Your ex-wife called the kitchen. She said you forget to eat green things when you're brooding."

Marcus stared at the vegetable. Sarah had always known him better than he knew himself—which made her leaving for his business partner that much more incomprehensible.

Below the terrace, couples played padel on the illuminated courts. The rhythmic *thwack-hiss* of racquets against ball echoed up like a metronome counting down the hours of his catastrophic marriage. He watched two women in their twenties laugh mid-swing, hair tangling, hands touching as if by accident and not at all. The easy intimacy made his chest ache.

His phone buzzed. Sarah. Again.

*The sphinx asks,* her text read, *what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in evening?*

Marcus had spent fifteen years thinking he knew the answer. A man. A husband. A father eventually. Now he understood: the sphinx wasn't asking about stages of life. She was asking about carrying things—expectations, disappointments, the weight of becoming someone you'd never intended to be.

He took a bite of spinach. Bitter, earthy, honest.

*Answer:* he typed back. *Crawling. Walking. Leaning.*

The sphinx seemed almost to smile as the sun rose over the padel courts. Somewhere in the distance, a baseball game played on a radio. Another day at bat. Another chance to swing and miss, or finally—maybe—to hit it out of the park.