What the Sphinx Remembers

The spinach sizzled in the pan as Maya's iPhone lit up the counter. His name. Again.

She'd started taking a B-complex vitamin three months ago when the sleepless nights began—some desperate attempt to shore up her crumbling nervous system. Now the bottle sat beside her bed, a daily reminder that she knew something was wrong before she'd let herself admit it.

You're like a sphinx, he'd told her once, early on, when they were still saying things that sounded like compliments. So inscrutable. So mysterious. He hadn't meant it as a warning.

The phone buzzed again. A text, this time. She didn't need to read it to know what it said. The spinach was wilting now, turning dark and sodden, like something that had given up trying to stay fresh.

Last night, she'd asked him directly: Are you seeing someone?

He'd looked at her with those careful, bottomless eyes. What makes you think that?

The sphinx had posed riddles to travelers, devouring those who couldn't answer. But Maya was realizing she had it backwards. She was the one who'd been devoured—slowly, bite by patient bite—by a man who made her feel that asking for truth was itself a kind of betrayal.

The pan was smoking. She turned off the burner.

Her iPhone showed the full message now: Can we talk?

Three years, and this was how it ended: not with shouting or slammed doors, but with burned spinach and a text message that made her realize the riddle wasn't about what he'd done. The riddle was why she'd spent so long pretending not to know.

Maya dumped the spinach into the trash. She left the pan unwashed, the vitamin bottle on her nightstand, the phone on the counter. At the door, she paused, then grabbed her keys.

Some riddles answer themselves when you stop trying to solve them.