What the Palm Reader Didn't Say

The sphinx had been watching them for three thousand years, and still had nothing to say about whether Marcus should leave.

Elena sat cross-legged on the hotel balcony in Luxor, an orange glowing in her hand like a small, stubborn sun. She peeled it slowly, the citrus scent cutting through the desert heat.

"She said your life line forks," Elena said, not looking at him. "In Cairo. That fortune teller behind the museum. Remember?"

Marcus leaned against the railing, nursing warm beer. The cat from the restaurant below—the one with the missing ear and uneven gait—had followed them upstairs and now wound between his ankles. "She said that to everyone. It's how they get you to come back."

"But you believed her. I saw you. You tipped her extra."

He sighed. The sphinx silhouette dominated the horizon, that impossible riddle carved from limestone, half-lion, half-human, wholly indifferent to marriages that had stopped working years ago. "I believed a lot of things then."

She offered him a section of orange. He took it, their fingers brushing—automatic, practiced, meaningless.

"What did the fork mean?" she asked. "In your interpretation?"

"Two paths. Choice. The usual bullshit."

"Or that one life ends and another begins."

Marcus looked at her really looked at her, for the first time in months. The cat jumped onto the rail between them, tail twitching.

"I'm not coming back to Chicago," he said.

Elena nodded, like she'd known. Like the sphinx had whispered it to her while he slept. "The fortune teller said you'd choose. She just didn't say what."

"She also said we'd have three children."

"Well." Elena smiled, small and sharp. "Even the sphinx gets things wrong sometimes."

They finished the orange together in silence, watching ancient stone stare down at modern ruin, while the desert wind carried away the last things they'd never say to each other.