The Riddle We Never Asked

The client sat in the conference room like a sphinx, impassive and unreadable, while my husband pitched our agency's new campaign. I watched from the back, nursing lukewarm coffee and the bitter suspicion that had been gnawing at me for weeks. Marcus's phone had been buzzing with texts from someone named "F" — coincidentally the same initial as Felicity, his sharp-witted copywriter who the office called "the fox" behind her back, though never to her face.

"I need to become something of a spy," I'd told my sister last night, not entirely joking. She'd laughed, said I'd been watching too many noir films on planes. But there was nothing cinematic about checking your husband's jacket pockets while he's in the shower, about finding a receipt for a hotel room downtown, about the way his eyes slide away from yours when you ask how his day was.

Now, watching Marcus charm the sphinx-like client with the kind of easy charisma I'd fallen for twelve years ago, I felt something crack open in my chest. The campaign was built around a pyramid scheme metaphor — something about how desire cascades downward through society, each tier wanting what the tier above has. The irony wasn't lost on me. Our marriage had become its own kind of pyramid: Marcus at the apex with his secrets, me supporting everything below, and somewhere in the middle, Felicity the fox, clever and hungry, climbing toward the top.

The meeting ended. The sphinx remained inscrutable. Marcus caught my eye from across the room and something flickered there — guilt? Defiance? Or simply the recognition that our shared life had become a riddle neither of us knew how to solve anymore. Later, in his office, I'd find confirmation in an email he'd forgotten to close. But in that moment, watching him through the glass wall, I understood the real truth: some sphinxes don't ask riddles. They simply wait, stone-faced and patient, while you destroy yourself solving mysteries that were never really mysteries at all.