The Sphinx Watches Us Drown

The pool was emptier at sunset, which was exactly why Elena preferred it. She'd been swimming laps for an hour, her arms burning, the chlorinated water washing away the day's conversations — the sympathetic coworkers, the urgent texts from her mother asking if she'd really moved out, the single voicemail from Richard that she'd deleted without listening.

She surfaced near the edge, gasping, and noticed the woman on the lounge chair beside her belongings. The stranger was perhaps forty, elegant in that way European women achieved without seeming to try, wearing a linen hat that cast a shadow across her face. The hat was old — the brim slightly frayed — and it gave her the appearance of someone hiding in plain sight.

"You swim like you're escaping something," the woman said, her accent faint but present. Not French. Maybe Italian. "Or perhaps swimming toward something."

Elena gripped the pool edge, water streaming from her hair. "Both. Neither. I'm not sure anymore."

"The sphinx knows that feeling." The woman gestured toward the hotel's reproduction statue near the garden entrance. "Riddles without answers. Secrets she'll never tell. My husband left me for his assistant. Twenty years of marriage, dissolved like sugar in hot tea. I came here to figure out who I was without him."

Elena studied her own hands, the gold band gone, leaving a pale strip of untanned skin. "I left mine. He didn't understand why I needed more than being his wife. He said I was complicated. Difficult."

"Complicated is just a word men use when women refuse to be simple." The woman laughed, a dry, knowing sound. "I'm Carla, by the way."

"Elena."

"Well, Elena." Carla adjusted her hat, tilting it back. "I've been here three days. I've learned that the pool is warmer than the ocean, the gin is better at the bar near the sphinx, and sometimes the best company is a stranger who knows exactly how much everything can hurt."

Elena pulled herself from the water, dripping, suddenly exhausted and exhilarated all at once. "Will you show me the good gin?"

Carla stood, offering her hand. "First, we swim. Together. Neither toward nor away from anything. Just swimming."

The Egyptian sun dipped below the horizon, and somewhere in the distance, the sphinx kept her secrets, her stone eyes fixed on two women who were, finally, beginning to surface.