The Riddle We Never Solved

Maya stood before the sphinx at the MET, its granite face worn smooth by three thousand years of unworthy questions. The thunder outside rattled the skylight — a storm approaching Manhattan the way secrets always do, gathering force before breaking.

"You always preferred the ones that didn't talk back."

Ethan's voice behind her. She hadn't seen him in seven months, since the night his wife found the messages. The lightning flash through the glass dome illuminated everything she shouldn't still feel.

"I'm here for the Egyptian collection," she said, not turning. "Not a reunion."

"It's a sphinx, Maya. It asks riddles. You love riddles."

He moved closer, and she caught his reflection in the display glass — gray at his temples now, lines she'd put there. They'd been colleagues first, competitors second, something unnameable third. The friend she'd trusted with her marriage's slow death, the friend who'd become its autopsy.

"What's the riddle?" she asked, still not facing him.

"What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in evening?"

"Man. Everyone knows that one."

"No," he said, and his hand brushed her arm — the same electric jolt as that hotel bar in New Orleans, the same catastrophic judgment. "The riddle is: who do you become when you finally get what you thought you wanted?"

She turned then. The storm broke outside — lightning fracturing the sky white, the sphinx watching impassively as it had watched empires fall.

"We were never friends," she said. "Friends don't do what we did."

"No," Ethan agreed, and for the first time she heard the exhaustion beneath his charm. "Friends don't. But maybe sphinxes do — sit on treasures, guard secrets, wait for someone brave enough or stupid enough to try answering wrong."

The gallery lights flickered. Somewhere, alarms began their soft whooping as the storm hit the electrical grid. In that half-light between power sources, she saw him clearly: not the villain, not the mistake, just another person who'd confused lightning strike for permanent illumination.

"I'm leaving," she said.

"I know," he said. "That's the right answer."

She walked away through the darkening museum, the sphinx silent behind her, the storm outside finally matching the one she'd been carrying since before she'd met him. Some riddles, she realized, you solve by walking away.