The Riddle Without an Answer

The pool was empty at 5 AM, which was exactly how Elena liked it. She'd been swimming laps for twenty years, longer than she'd known Marcus, longer than the affair that had somehow stretched into a decade. Her arms cut through the water with practiced rhythm, each stroke a sentence in an ongoing argument with herself.

Marcus had been a sphinx of a man—inscrutable, composed, possessed of that maddening ability to make everyone around him feel slightly less clever. At the office, he'd sat three desks away, typing emails that never quite said what they meant. In bed, he'd been the same: restrained, watchful, his eyes always holding something back. Elena had spent ten years trying to solve him, convinced that if she could just find the right question, he'd finally give her a real answer.

Now he was dead—a heart attack at forty-seven, completely mundane, utterly unlike him—and she was still swimming, still searching.

She touched the wall and flipped, water streaming from her hair like the unraveling of a thought she'd never quite formed. The problem with loving a sphinx, she thought, pushing off into another lap, was that you spent so long decoding riddles that you forgot to ask if there was ever a treasure at the end.

"Were you even my friend?" she'd whispered at his funeral, standing too close to his wife, who somehow looked even more composed than usual. The word had felt small, inadequate. Friend. Lover. Coworker. None of the categories fit.

The pool lights flickered—time's up, probably. Elena stopped swimming, treading water in the sudden quiet. She realized she'd never know who Marcus actually was, and the riddle wasn't that he'd kept secrets from her. The riddle was that she'd never truly asked.

She pulled herself up the ladder, water dripping onto the concrete, and walked toward the locker room without looking back.