The Riddle of Us

The miniature sphinx on the mantelpiece watched me with painted stone eyes, its enigmatic smile mocking my turmoil. Marcus had brought it back from Cairo—his third trip that year, each one straining our marriage thinner than the frayed charging cable I now twisted between my fingers.

"You're being paranoid," he'd said last night, turning away in our king-sized bed that felt suddenly vast.

But my iPhone didn't lie. The screen glowed with evidence I'd gathered over weeks: unfamiliar locations in his location history, deleted messages recovered from iCloud, a second phone number that appeared only during his "business trips." I'd become the very thing I despised—a spy in my own marriage, stalking my husband through digital footprints and suspicious credit card charges.

The sphinx's riddle echoed in my mind: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? We'd laughed about it once, tipsy on wine and optimism in our early thirties. Now at forty-five, I felt like I was crawling.

My thumb hovered over the last message—the one that would change everything. The cable connecting me to this moment, to this decision, was the same one charging my phone, tethering me to a truth I wasn't ready to face.

The front door clicked. Marcus's key in the lock.

I set the phone face down on the marble counter. The sphinx kept its secret. Some riddles, I realized, aren't meant to be solved—not tonight. Not when the alternative was shattering everything we'd built, even if it was already crumbling beneath the weight of unsaid words and half-truths.

"Hey," he called from the hallway. "You awake?"

The sphinx smiled on. I let the cable slip from my fingers.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm here."