What the Pool Knows

The hotel pool at 2 AM was not meant for **swimming**, but Elena found herself there anyway, sliding into the water fully clothed while her husband slept upstairs. Her sundress billowed around her like a drowning ghost. She'd spent seven years becoming the woman Marcus wanted—softening her edges, learning to laugh at jokes that weren't funny, wondering when she'd stopped recognizing the **hair** in the mirror.

A **sphinx** statue presided over the pool area, kitschy and weathered, its limestone face cracked in a permanent smirk. Hotel art, meant to suggest exotic wisdom. Elena swam toward it, trailing questions in her wake.

"You'll stay, won't you?" her sister had asked that afternoon, picking at her **spinach** salad while avoiding Elena's eyes. "It's just a rough patch."

Rough patch. The phrase clung to her like chlorine.

Marcus's **iPhone** had buzzed all through dinner—work emergencies, he'd claimed, though Elena had noticed the quick way he'd turned the screen away. She could check it now. His phone sat on the patio table beside hers, two black rectangles like twin tombstones.

She treaded water, cold seeping into her bones, and thought about riddles. The sphinx asked questions and devoured those who couldn't answer. But no one had ever specified what happened to those who could.

Elena pushed herself up and out of the pool, dripping onto the concrete. She walked past the phones without glancing down, leaving wet footprints toward the hotel exit. Some answers required not knowing the question at all.