The Riddle Between Us

Maya sat on the edge of the hotel bed, her iPhone glowing in the darkened room like some artificial moon. David was already asleep, his breathing rhythmic and infuriatingly peaceful. Outside their Cairo hotel window, the Great Pyramid loomed against the night sky — a monument to eternity, while she couldn't even get five minutes of honest conversation out of her husband.

They'd come to Egypt to save their marriage, or that's what David had said when he booked the tickets. But here they were, three days in, and the only thing she'd learned was that David preferred text messages to talking. Even now, his phone sat silent on the nightstand, its face black and unresponsive, much like him.

The Sphinx had been his idea too. "We'll go tomorrow," he'd said over dinner, scrolling through emails instead of looking at her. "It's mysterious. Romantic."

Maya had laughed, the sound hollow even to her own ears. "You think a limestone lion with a human head is romantic?"

"You know what I mean."

But did she? The riddle of the Sphinx seemed straightforward compared to the puzzle of her marriage. At least Oedipus had known what he was dealing with. Maya couldn't remember the last time David had really looked at her, not through the filter of his phone's screen or across the dinner table with that distant, thousand-yard stare.

She thought about the pyramids they'd visited earlier — how the guide had explained that the workers were buried in gratitude, not in servitude. What had she built with David? Years of shared history, certainly. A comfortable home. A routine so polished it felt like a religious observance. But beneath it all, something hollow. A chamber she was afraid to explore alone.

Her iPhone buzzed — a work email, useless at this hour. She silenced it, suddenly exhausted by the perpetual tether to people who didn't actually know her.

David stirred but didn't wake. In the blue light from her phone, Maya studied his face — the lines that had deepened around his eyes, the gray at his temples. She loved him, still. That was the terrible part. She just didn't know how to reach him anymore.

The Sphinx had asked its riddle of every traveler: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? The answer had always seemed so obvious — a human being, crawling, walking, then leaning on a cane. But perhaps the real riddle was something else: What builds monuments to love while forgetting how to speak it?

Maya set down her phone. Outside, the pyramid caught the first light of dawn. She would wake David. They would go see the Sphinx together. And maybe, just maybe, she would finally ask him the question that had been sitting on her tongue for months: Are you still here with me, or have you already left?

The riddle wasn't the answer. It was the courage to ask.