The Sphinx Held All Our Secrets

Marcus stood at the edge of the pool at 5 AM, the water still as glass, the only movement the slight ripple of his breath fogging in the cold morning air. Swimming had become his prayer, his confessional, the only place where the scream building in his chest could dissolve into something manageable. Twenty laps. Always twenty.

He thought about last night—Elena chopping spinach with deliberate, violent precision, the knife hitting the cutting board with the rhythm of a ticking bomb. She hadn't looked at him when she said it, the words landing like stones in the silence between them: "I met someone."

The sphinx statue in their garden—her eccentric purchase from that gallery in Barcelona—seemed to mock him now. Its enigmatic smile, the riddle it had posed them for three years of marriage: *What happens when love becomes a habit you forget to break?* He'd thought they were happy. He'd thought the late nights at work were building a future, not digging an exit.

"We're playing padel tomorrow," she'd added, still not looking up from the spinach. "With him."

Marcus had stopped eating. The spinach suddenly looked like something that belonged in a funeral arrangement.

Now, pulling himself from the pool, water streaming off his body like he was being born again or maybe dying slowly, he understood something about riddles. The sphinx didn't ask because it wanted answers. It asked because it already knew.

He toweled off, walked past the garden where the stone creature waited, and through the kitchen door. Elena was there, coffee in hand, watching him with eyes he couldn't read anymore.

"You're swimming early," she said.

"Couldn't sleep."

"Marcus—"

"Don't. Please."

She nodded, understanding this small mercy. "I'll make breakfast. Spinach and eggs?"

He almost laughed. Instead, he said, "Sure." And they both pretended they didn't hear the sound of something ending in the space between the words.