He dances around me to the cabinet, a choreographed routine, pulling glasses and silverware as I carry the food to the kitchen table. There’s a beauty in the way we revolve around each other in that tight space, a moon around a sun. I am just not sure which of us is which.

Without Meret as a buffer between us, the air becomes tinder, and any rogue word might make it combust.

“How was your day?” Brian asks. Neutral. Safe.

“Good.” I swallow a bite. “How was your day?”

“I talked to the people who organized the conference. They asked me to present in October instead.”

“Good.”

“Yeah.”

I look up to find Brian watching me. “When did this all get so hard?” he asks softly. He has the grace to blush. “Not just this,” he says, gesturing between us. “But all of it.” He glances up the staircase.

I settle my fork against my plate. I’ve lost my appetite. Maybe I will tell this to Meret. The best diet plan is waking up one day and wondering how the hell you got here. “Can I ask you something? How many tickets did you buy for that MIT lecture?”

Brian tilts his head. “Is this a trick question?”

“No. Just curiosity.”

“Two,” he says. “You usually see clients on Saturday and I assumed—”

“You assumed,” I interrupt.

He is genuinely confused. “Do you want to see the octopus? I’m sure I can get another ticket—”

“This isn’t about the octopus,” I say. “Why didn’t you even ask if I wanted to go?”

Brian rubs his forehead. “Can we…not fight?” he sighs. “Can we just…eat?”

I nod. I pick up my knife and fork and start cutting my chicken into tiny pieces. And again. I wonder how small I can get them. I count to one hundred as I do this. I push the tiny bites around on my plate.

“Dawn.”

Brian has been watching me the whole time. His voice is wrapped in batting, so soft I can barely hear it. It is a broken bone of desperation, and it won’t set.

I meet his gaze over a tabletop that is suddenly so vast we might as well be on different continents. We might as well be my mother in Boston, squinting to see the coast of Ireland again.

“Tell me what you want from me,” Brian begs.

I should dive in and start swimming, but I’m already sinking here on dry land.

“I shouldn’t have to,” I say.

TECHNICALLY, WYATT CANNOT hire me to work at his dig site. It’s a Yale concession; I have no connection to Yale anymore. The graduate students and colleagues who fall under the umbrella of the university each season have work visas and have been vetted by the Egyptian government for their credentials in the field of antiquities.

I don’t know why I asked Wyatt for a job. I blurted it out, instead of all the things I really want to say. But asking for a job is simpler, and will buy me the time I need for the rest.

“There must be someone you can ask,” I beg. “Someone who can bend the rules.”

Out of the blue I remember that, back when I left, Westerners were not supposed to travel on the Desert Road between Minya and Cairo. Hasib—Harbi’s father—had given Wyatt directions to the airport with this warning to stay off that thoroughfare. Unless, he had said, you are brave of heart. Which meant, when we were stopped at a checkpoint, Wyatt had played dumb, saying he had no idea about the restriction, until we were waved through.

Wyatt sinks down onto the arm of a battered chair. “Forgive me, but I assume that you haven’t been in the field for the past fifteen years?”

I feel a pang, realizing that he has not been keeping tabs on my life, and what became of me, but then why should he have? I was the one who walked away without looking back. I force myself to meet his gaze. “No.”

“Why, Dawn?” he asks quietly. “Why now?”

I hesitate, considering how to tell him the truth without garnering his pity. “Do you know how, if you chop down a tree, you can look at its rings and be able to tell the moments where everything changed? Like, a forest fire. Or a plague of bugs. A year where there was a drought, another year where something fell against the trunk and made it grow in a different direction?” He nods. “This would be one of those moments.”

“You’ve been blown pretty far off course if you landed in Egypt,” Wyatt says.

“Or I was blown pretty far off course when I left.”

His eyes narrow. “Look. I’d like to help you but I can’t just—”

“Wyatt,” I interrupt. “Please.”

“Dawn, are you all right? If you’re in trouble—”

“I just need a job.”

Wyatt sighs. “There’s a chance I can pull strings for next January. This isn’t even our dig season.”

“But you’re here. Working. I mean, that’s a sign, isn’t it? That you’re here, and I’m here…” I swallow. “I know you need the help. You don’t have to pay me. You just have to give me a chance. And then…” I falter. “Then you’ll never have to see me again.”

Wyatt looks at me. His eyes are still the blue of the heart of a flame, the blue of the sky when you have been staring too long and close your eyes and still find it painted there. His fingers tap a tattoo on his thigh. I can almost see ribbons of thought and reason being fed through the machine of his mind. “I know I made you a promise a long time ago,” he begins, and in that instant I realize he is going to tell me what I do not want to hear.

I brace myself, knowing I made a mistake. What if cannot trump what is.

“I can’t make any guarantees, but I’ll see if I can get you a temporary permit.”

My head snaps up. “You will?”

“Isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes,” I breathe. I take a step toward him, and then that strange and shifting invisible wall between us reminds me to stay where I am. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me.” Wyatt stands. “I haven’t done anything yet, and if you do get to stay, you’re going to be worked to the bone. Let me introduce you to everyone, and then we can drive into Minya to the antiquities office this afternoon.” He starts out of the library, expecting me to follow. I can hear the house humming, the Arabic chatter of Harbi and his family preparing a meal; the pipes clearing their throats as water rushes through them.

Suddenly, Wyatt stops so abruptly that I nearly crash into him. He turns around so that we are frozen in the hallway, eye to eye. “One more thing?” he says. “I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know what you’re hiding. And you may well be out of practice.” Then a smile ghosts over his lips, a challenge. “But I unearth things for a living.”

* * *

—

UNTIL RECENTLY, EGYPTIANS who graduated from college were guaranteed jobs by the Egyptian government, which meant there was a glut of government employees and not a tremendous amount of work to do—one study suggested that the average government employee only actually performed about a half hour of labor per day. Because of this, working with the Yale concession was a plum occupation, and Harbi’s father and the others I had known fifteen years earlier were so good at their jobs that it became a family affair, passed down over generations. Wyatt introduces me to Mohammed Mahmoud, son of the Mohammed I knew when I was last here. He works now with Harbi, Abdou, and Ahmed to prepare food, clean the Dig House, and labor on site. In between dig seasons, he and his family live in Luxor.

Wyatt introduces me as an old friend to those who weren’t here before. Some call me doctora, like Harbi did. “It’s just Dawn,” I say cheerfully, but I am aware of Wyatt’s eyes on me the entire time. When he leads me out of the kitchen, I ask, “What happened to Harbi’s leg?”

He props a shoulder against the stucco wall. “How come you didn’t finish your degree?” When I don’t respond, he shrugs. “Think of it as currency. You want an answer, you have to give one.”

“I got an MSW instead,” I say. “Academia wasn’t going to pan out.”

Wyatt regards me, as if he’s trying to figure out if I am telling the truth. “Harbi’s leg broke when a ladder gave way in a tomb shaft about five years ago. Never set right.”

I suddenly see a ladder tangling under my own feet in the tomb of Djehutyhotep II, Wyatt catching me and breaking the fall. I remember how he smelled like the sun baked into his clothes and also butterscotch. How, weeks later I would learn that he kept sweets in his pocket, for himself and to give to the barefoot children who waited for him in the blistering heat at the entrance to the wadi as we left for the day.

“Come on,” he says. “Let me show you what we’re working on.”

In the main room of the Dig House, there is still swing music playing. A young man with tightly cropped hair is bent over a table, sketching Paleolithic flints, which are lined up in neat rows. Wyatt picks one up and passes it to me; I run my finger over the scalloped edge. “Joe,” he says, “this is Dawn.” Joe pushes his glasses up and nods to me, waiting for an explanation from Wyatt that isn’t forthcoming. “He’s the only grad student here this late in the year,” Wyatt explains.

“I’m hoping for a trophy.” Joe laughs. “Or at least a grave marker: Here lies Joe Cullen, dessicated in the desert.”