The Riddle of the Shore

Maya stood at the edge of the Pacific, the salt water lapping at her bare feet, cold and indifferent. Three weeks after David left, and she still couldn't decide whether she was drowning or learning to breathe underwater. Her palm pressed against her chest, feeling the hollow rhythm of a heart that refused to break properly.

The iPhone in her pocket buzzed again—probably him, probably another message claiming he'd made a mistake. She ignored it. Some sphinxes didn't deserve their riddles answered.

"You look like someone trying to remember a language you forgot you spoke."

Maya turned. A woman stood behind her, maybe fifty, with silver-streaked hair and eyes that had seen too many endings. She held a disconnected cable in one hand, black and serpentine.

"I'm fine," Maya said automatically.

"Fine is what we tell ourselves when the truth would crack us open." The woman gestured to the horizon. "I come here every morning. My husband used to bring coffee. Now I bring myself. The water doesn't judge."

"Did he...?"

"Die? No. He found someone younger. Someone who doesn't ask what he's thinking about in the shower." The woman's laugh was dry, desert wind through dead leaves. "The first year, I thought I'd dissolve. Then I realized I was finally solid. Like I'd been water my whole life and only then froze into something that could hold its own shape."

Maya's phone buzzed again, insistently. She pulled it out. David's name illuminated the screen: I don't know who I am without you.

"The sphinx," the woman said, nodding at the phone. "What's the riddle?"

"He thinks he needs me to be whole."

"And you?"

Maya looked at the message, then at the endless gray water. She remembered the way David had looked at her across their bed that last morning—confused, almost frightened, as if he'd woken up beside a stranger he'd slept beside for seven years.

"I think," Maya said slowly, "I think I spent so long becoming the person he needed that I forgot to ask who I needed."

The woman smiled, reached out, and squeezed Maya's shoulder. "The answer isn't in the phone, darling. It's in choosing not to answer."

Maya's thumb hovered over the screen. Then she pressed decline, dropped the phone into her pocket, and let the ocean rush over her feet. For the first time in years, she didn't reach for anyone's hand but her own.