The Riddle of Everything

The pool at the Athens Hilton was empty at 3 AM, the water mercury-still under the harsh ceiling lights. Maya swam laps, her stroke mechanical, counting each one like prayer beads she no longer believed in.

Three weeks since Richard left. Three weeks since the sphinx-like silence of his departure—the riddle without an answer, the elegant shrugging off of seven years like a coat that no longer fit. At the office, his name still appeared on the corner office door, a hieroglyph of her failure.

She surfaced, gasping. The lifeguard, an elderly man with eyes like cracked glass, dozed on his stool. He reminded her of their dog, Barnaby, that Richard had insisted they give away when they moved to the city for his promotion. "Dogs don't belong in penthouses," he'd said, and she'd nodded, packed up the dog's bed, the bowl, the small velvet collar. She'd been swimming through compromise ever since.

"You always were too clever for your own happiness," her mother had told her once, "like that fable about the fox and the grapes."

Maya laughed bitterly, a sound that died against the tiles. Richard had called her foxy—cunning, sharp, never satisfied. But it was he who'd played them both, the meticulous architect of their mutual destruction. He'd been promoted over her head last month. The same day he told her he'd met someone else. Someone simpler, he'd said. Someone who didn't see through him.

She pulled herself from the water, shivering. The sphinx had been destroyed, piece by piece, by wind and time and the casual cruelty of empires. Relationships were no different. They eroded.

"Excuse me?" A woman's voice from the pool deck. Young, beautiful, holding a towel embroidered with the hotel's logo. "Are you okay?"

Maya looked at her—Richard's new simplicity, perhaps. Or just another traveler swimming through the dark hours of someone else's life.

"I'm learning to be," Maya said, and meant it.