The Sphinx of Server Room Four

Elena stared at the **cable** snaking across the floor like a black viper, its end severed where someone had tripped over it earlier that day. 2:47 AM. The building hummed around her, the server room's collective whine sounding like a mechanical chorus of complaints.

She should have gone home hours ago. Instead, she'd stayed, compulsively running diagnostics, watching the data streams flow and falter. At forty-three, Elena had become obsessed with endpoints and disconnections. Her therapist called it transference — something about her mother's dementia, the way the woman's thoughts frayed and snapped like overused wire.

Her phone buzzed. David: *You coming to bed?*

Elena touched her **hair**, now streaked with silver at the temples. Once thick and dark, it had thinned over the past year despite the expensive shampoos, despite the biotin and the prescription-strength **vitamin** D supplements her doctor insisted wouldn't help but couldn't hurt. David stopped touching her hair six months ago. He said it was nothing — he was just tired, work stress, the usual lies — but she'd noticed how his hand hovered, then retreated, as if she'd become something sharp.

The server room felt like an Egyptian tomb, cold and monumental. The backup server rack loomed in the corner like a **sphinx**, its blinking lights inscrutable eyes demanding answers she couldn't provide. Riddle me this: when does a marriage become a system failure?

She remembered finding the receipt in David's jacket. Not for jewelry. For hair restoration treatment. He'd never even mentioned it. The betrayal wasn't the vanity — God knew she understood vanity. It was the silence. The way he'd looked at her thinning hair with pity instead of desire, hiding his own fear behind careful neutrality.

The cable on the floor was an easy fix. Just splice it, reconnect, test the signal. But some connections, once severed, couldn't be mended with tools and patience.

Elena typed *Almost* and hit send, then deleted it. Typing *Not tonight*, she pressed her palm against the server's warm metal flank, feeling its vibration, pretending it was a human pulse. She would finish the repair. She would go home. She would pretend not to see how David looked at her. Some sphinxes kept their secrets forever.