What the Sphinx Couldn't Bear

Elena found him in the studio at midnight, surrounded by sketches of sphinxes—hundreds of them, each more twisted than the last. The bronze piece he'd been commissioned to restore sat in the corner, its wings half-attached, its human face wearing that eternal, inscrutable smile.

"You're obsessing," she said, leaning against the doorframe. Her robe was silk, emerald, the same color she'd worn at their wedding seven years ago. Or maybe it was six. Time had started blurring somewhere around the miscarriage.

Marcus didn't turn. "It's the riddle, El. The restoration work is fine. But the riddle—the thing about the sphinx is that she asked questions nobody could answer. And when they failed, she destroyed them."

"That's myth, Marcus."

"Is it?" He finally looked at her, and she saw how tired he was. How his eyes had been tired for months. "We've been playing at this marriage for three years, El. I bear it because I love you. But there's a difference between bearing and living."

She felt it then—the sharp intake of breath, the way her chest tightened. "So what's your riddle?"

"Are you happy?" He said it softly. "Not content, not settled. Happy."

The bullheaded stubbornness that had made her fall in love with him, that had carried them through his mother's death and her promotion, through freezing apartments and sun-drenched beaches—now it felt like a weapon.

"I don't know," she said. And the truth of it cracked something open inside her.

The sphinx watched from the corner, its bronze skin gleaming in the lamplight. Some questions, Elena realized, weren't meant to be answered. They were meant to be asked, over and over, until the asking itself became a kind of answer.

"Stay tonight," she said. "We don't have to fix anything. We just have to be here."

Marcus set down his charcoal. The studio was quiet, full of unfinished things and questions without answers. Some riddles, he thought, you learn to live with rather than solve.