The Sphinx Waits

Elena floated on her back in the hotel pool, the Cairo heat pressing down like a judgment. She'd been **running** for three weeks now—first from the apartment she'd shared with Marcus, then from the questions her mother kept asking, and finally all the way to Egypt, as if distance could somehow dissolve the knot in her chest.

She'd met Fox at the office holiday party. His real name was Richard, but everyone called him Fox for his sharp features and sharper tongue. He was the kind of man who could **swimming** through corporate politics without getting wet, while Elena had always been the one drowning in committees she couldn't navigate. The affair had been inevitable, she told herself later. She'd been vulnerable after her promotion fell through, and Fox had known exactly which wounds to press his fingers against.

"You're overthinking it," he'd said the last time she saw him, adjusting his cufflinks in the hotel room mirror. "Sometimes things just run their course."

Now she was **swimming** laps in a pool that felt too much like the one she'd grown up in, the one where her father had taught her that if you stopped moving, you'd sink. She wondered if that was true of everything.

The **sphinx** was visible from the hotel terrace, limestone body weathering into the desert. She'd gone to see it up close yesterday, stood before its broken face and realized the riddle wasn't something you solved—it was something you endured. The sphinx had watched thousands of years of people make the same mistakes, fall in and out of love, convince themselves this time would be different.

Her phone buzzed on the lounge chair. Marcus, again. Or maybe Fox. She'd blocked both numbers but they found ways through. She let it ring, turning onto her stomach to slice through the water, stroke after stroke until her arms burned. **Running** hadn't worked. **Swimming** wasn't working. The answer wasn't motion.

She climbed out of the pool, water dripping from her skin onto the concrete, and watched the sun set behind the sphinx's silhouette. Some riddles don't have answers—only the asking, over and over, until you learn to live with the mystery of yourself.