The Sphinx on the Mantel

The brass sphinx on the mantel watched us with enameled eyes, its riddle finally answered in the worst way.

"I'm not who you think I am," Peter said, setting down his wineglass. The trilby hat—his hat, the one I'd bought him in London five years ago—sat on the kitchen counter behind him like a third party to our marriage's dissolution.

My phone had buzzed ten minutes earlier. A corporate security firm, confirming what I'd already begun to suspect. Peter wasn't a mid-level accountant. He was a corporate spy, embedded in my company to steal trade secrets. And I'd been the one who'd vouched for him when he was hired.

Milo, our tabby cat, wound around my legs, purring, unaware that his dinner schedule was about to become the least of our problems. Animals know when something's wrong, but they don't know what. Lucky them.

"How long?" I asked. My voice sounded calm. That was the surprising part—the calmness, like standing at the center of a hurricane.

"Three years. Elise, it wasn't supposed to—"

"Don't." I picked up Milo, burying my face in his fur. He smelled like cat litter and comfort. "Don't tell me what it was or wasn't supposed to be."

The sphinx had been a wedding gift from Peter's sister, who'd collected Egyptian antiquities. "Marriage is the ultimate riddle," she'd said. "Nobody solves it." I'd thought she was being cynical.

"I love you," Peter said. "That part wasn't—"

"A job?" I met his eyes across the kitchen island, three years of intimacy suddenly rendered suspect. Every late night, every business trip, every encrypted email I'd noticed but not questioned. "Did you ever love me? Or was I just exceptionally placed access?"

Milo squirmed in my arms and jumped down, padding toward his bowl. The mundane persistence of hunger. Life, as they say, goes on.

"Both," Peter said quietly. "It started as access. It became—"

"Both," I repeated. "That's the most terrible thing you could have said."

I walked to the counter, picked up his hat. The leather band was worn where he'd gripped it countless times. Three years of touches, of trust, of a cat who'd slept on his chest every morning like nothing was wrong.

"Go," I said.

"Elise—"

"Take your hat. Take whatever extraction team is probably parked downstairs. But leave me the sphinx. At least one of us should have to live with the riddle."