The Sphinx of 14th Floor

The corporate pyramid rose forty floors above Chicago, but Mara only cared about the fourteenth. That's where she'd spent seven years answering questions that weren't really questions at all. That's where Daniel worked.

"You're like a sphinx," he'd told her once, leaning against her cubicle wall with that maddening calm. "Silent. Watching. Knowing things you won't say."

Now she held an orange in her hand, its bright dimpled skin incongruous against the gray carpet. It was three in the morning. Daniel had called her to the emergency exit stairwell, said he needed to tell her something important about the restructuring. About them.

She'd spent years mastering the art of being unreadable. Being the sphinx. But tonight, the water cooler gossip had finally breached her defenses. Daniel was leaving. Taking the promotion in Singapore. Leaving behind the wife he'd never mentioned, the life he'd built here. Leaving her.

The stairwell door clicked open. Daniel stepped out, his face shadowed, tie loosened. He stopped when he saw the orange in her hand.

"Mara."

"Fox," she said quietly. It was what she'd called him since year two, when she'd realized he navigated office politics with impossible cunning, slipping through traps that caught everyone else.

He laughed softly, bitterly. "Still calling me that. Even now."

"Even now." She peeled the orange, the citrus scent cutting through the stairwell's metallic smell. "Singapore, Daniel? Really?"

"It's not what you think."

"It never is."

"The restructuring—" he started, then stopped. He looked at her, really looked at her, for what might have been the first time in seven years. "I'm not taking the promotion, Mara. I'm leaving her."

The orange wedge froze halfway to her mouth. "What?"

"I'm not taking the job. I'm not going anywhere. I'm—I'm getting divorced. And I was going to ask if..." He gestured helplessly between them. "If maybe there was a reason I stayed."

Mara felt something crack open inside her, something that had been sealed tight since she first decided being a sphinx was safer than being vulnerable. But she'd spent too long being the mystery, the enigma, the one who knew but never spoke.

"The water cooler says otherwise," she said, her voice barely audible.

"Fuck the water cooler."

She laughed, surprised by the raw honesty of it. For seven years, they'd spoken in corporate doublespeak and office innuendo. This was something else entirely.

"The sphinx finally speaks," he said, stepping closer.

"No," she said, offering him the other half of the orange. "The sphinx finally decides some riddles are worth answering."