The Riddle in the Water

Maya stood before the sphinx in the Egyptian Wing, her restoration kit spread across the scaffolding like surgical instruments. The limestone face had eroded over three thousand years, yet its expression remained inscrutable—partially human, partially something else. Something that knew secrets and kept them.

Her iPhone buzzed in her pocket. Again.

She'd been ignoring David's calls all morning. Something in his voice yesterday had shifted—the way he said "we need to talk" carried the weight of a thousand conversations before it, conversations she'd heard in cafes and offices and movies, conversations that meant something was ending.

The sphinx's riddle had supposedly been simple: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? The answer was man. But Maya wondered if the real riddle was how you could know someone for seven years, sleep beside them, build a life together, and still not know them at all.

Her phone lit up with a text: "Can we please talk?"

Behind her, a pipe burst.

Water sprayed from the ceiling in a violent arc, dousing the sphinx's ancient face, her tools, her phone. Maya scrambled to save the limestone fragments, the restoration chemicals, anything she could reach. But the water kept coming—a sudden, absurd flood in the climate-controlled silence of the museum.

Her iPhone, now dripping, displayed one final message from David: "I'm sorry. I met someone."

Maya stood knee-deep in the spreading water, watching the words blur across the screen. The sphinx stared past her, its stone eyes unchanged by drowning or heartbreak or the strange ways people ended things with phones instead of faces.

She turned off her phone. The sphinx had survived millennia. Surely she could survive this.

"You know," she said to the stone face, "I never liked that riddle anyway."

The water kept rising, indifferent to them both.