“Alberto and Joe seem nice.”

I once read an article about the differences between how men and women converse—how men prefer side-by-side conversation, because face-to-face feels confrontational; how women prefer talking face-to-face to read all the nonverbal cues. The article suggested broaching difficult subjects with your husband in the car, instead of over the dinner table, for this reason.

The author of this article clearly had not ridden in a Land Rover with Wyatt.

He glances at me, his wrist balanced on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, are we doing small talk now?”

“I’m just trying to have a conversation.”

“You didn’t seem to be eager to have one earlier.”

“It’s hard for me—”

“Do you not think this is hard for me, too?” Wyatt interrupts. His words feel like knives being thrown, pinning me back against the seat.

I close my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Even without looking, I can feel him staring at me. The air feels heavier. And then, as if someone has broken the glass of a window during an inferno, I can suddenly breathe. Wyatt is once again facing the road, his features smooth. “The reason I’m here when it’s hotter than hell is because the semester ended in May,” he says, as if half our conversation hadn’t taken place. “Then there was Ramadan, and I’ve got to excavate this tomb before classes start back up again mid-September.”

There’s additional information he isn’t sharing—maybe it has to do with funding. Maybe he can’t get any more without the proof that he has found a new tomb with an intact coffin. “You’re lucky you didn’t go into academia,” he adds. “Although I imagine social work isn’t a lark, either.”

He says it gently; it’s a peace offering. “I’m not a social worker,” I say. “I’m an end-of-life doula.”

“A…what?”

“I take care of people who are terminal.”

“So your clients are dying to meet you,” Wyatt replies.

I laugh. “You could say that. It wasn’t as huge a transition of career as I figured it would be. In a way, I’ve been studying death since I was eighteen.”

He glances at me. “Likewise,” he says frankly.

“And you? Still focused on the Book of Two Ways?”

Wyatt nods. “The translation we used to use? It fell by the wayside in 2017 with a new publication. Turns out there are mostly two independent Books of Two Ways, and even when the spells overlap, there are big variations in the text.”

Now he is talking to me not like an enemy, not like a refugee, but like a colleague. I catch my breath, feeling something I haven’t in a long while: the popping in my brain that used to happen when I listened to a stellar lecture or when I cracked a puzzle in translation.

“So the old translation was wrong.”

“Well, it wasn’t right,” Wyatt answers. “Oh! And remember how you were always livid because the Pyramid Texts that were found in the coffins were never printed in the Coffin Text publications?”

“Livid is a strong word…”

“They finally were. Two thousand six. Did you see it?”

“In 2006 all I was reading was Goodnight Moon.” I laugh.

Wyatt looks at me. The spare air in the truck is suddenly gone. “That’s a children’s book, isn’t it? You have children?”

“Child,” I say softly. “A daughter.”

“Presumably, she has a father,” Wyatt replies, his gaze fixed on the road.

I swallow. “She does.”

I look down at my hands, folded in my lap. I twist my wedding band around my finger as silence settles between us.

“I did think about you, you know,” Wyatt murmurs. “I wondered how someone could disappear into thin air.”

There is so much I want to tell him, need to tell him. But the words jam in my throat, dammed behind fear: fear that he doesn’t have time to babysit a middle-aged woman who wonders what else her life might have been, fear that he will send me packing, or that he will laugh at me. Or—maybe worse—that he is indifferent. That he’ll treat me like an amateur—the way we did, as Yale grad students, when we met someone who had read a little about pyramids as a kid or was obsessed with Brendan Fraser in The Mummy—polite but dismissive.

And me? Had I thought of Wyatt? I would be lying if I said no. I didn’t pine for him; I loved Brian. But there would be times when I would be comfortably immersed in my daily life and he’d pop into my head. When we went to Greece for my thirtieth birthday, and on the cobbled streets, I watched children sort through broken potsherds. Putting on eyeliner and regarding the tilted wing in the mirror, and picturing Wyatt trying—and failing—to sketch the kohl-rimmed eyes of a nomarch’s wife on a sheet of Mylar.

“I thought of you when the FBI cracked the case about the severed mummy head in the MFA,” I tell him. “Remember how Dumphries didn’t know if it belonged to the male mummy or his wife?”

I had read the story in The Boston Globe—how doctors had done a CT scan of the mummy’s head and noticed that there were mutilations to the mouth and jaw area, all the parts that would have been involved while eating. Immediately, I had known why—the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, performed on the deceased so that they could eat and drink in the Netherworld. But they still didn’t know who the mummy was, definitively, and so the FBI was called in to extract DNA from a tooth.

“I think I read that, too. Wasn’t it—” Wyatt starts, as I begin to speak.

“Mr. Djehutynakht,” we say in unison. Then we both burst out laughing.

He looks so at home here, his skin tanned and hair curling where beads of sweat rise on his temples. I wonder what would have happened if our roles had been reversed: if I had stayed, and he had gotten the call that changed the rest of his life. If he’d be awkward in a three-piece suit, working in London in finance or government. Then I remember that he was destined to become a British peer, doing whatever peers do. I conjure up a new image of Wyatt, playing polo. Sitting behind a mountain of paperwork at a heavy mahogany desk older than my entire country. Smiling up at his wife, who is named Pippa or Araminta, and who learned to ride before she could walk.

“Are you a marquess now?” I blurt out.

“Ah. Actually,” Wyatt says, “yes.”

“I’m sorry.” I know that would mean his father had died.

“The title is utter rot. I’m here, or in New Haven, anyway. I don’t actually stand on the ceremony of it. Much to the dismay of my mother.” His lips twitch. “But since you didn’t bother to call me my lord when I was an earl, perhaps you should start now.”

“I’d rather swallow my tongue,” I say.

He grins. “I admit I’ve never heard of a death doula before.”

“It’s a different model of care. It’s…richer, if that makes sense. A doctor spends about seven minutes on average with a patient in traditional medical care. I become a part of the family, if that’s what the client wants. I’ll show up and sit vigil, but I also have the distance to ask the hard questions of the medical team and caregivers, and I don’t mind calling the DMV fifteen times if that’s what has to get done.” I hesitate, thinking through my responsibilities and trying to see them from the perspective of an outsider. “I guess I give people time at the moment they need it the most.”

“Is it depressing?”

“I mean, I cry sometimes.” I shrug. “The first time I cried in front of a client I beat myself up, but then that night her brother called to thank me. Seeing me cry made him realize that his sister wasn’t just a paycheck to me. So yeah, there’s sadness. But there are also moments of beauty.”

“Evidence?” Wyatt barks, and I bite back a smile—this is what Dumphries used to say to us, when we were in the field and made a hypothesis for which he wanted support.

“I had a trans client once, and just before she passed, her mother said, ‘I gave birth to a son, but I’m burying a daughter.’ And just like that, my client let go. It was almost like she needed to hear that before she died.”

“What have you learned?”

It’s such a professorial question I have to hide my grin. “Everyone’s surprised by death, which is kind of ridiculous, when you think about it. It’s not exactly a spoiler. But I think that what really shocked me is how many people can’t see the shape of the life they’ve lived until they get to the very end of it. You know?”

Wyatt nods. “Sure. It’s not until you start building your tomb that you realize you’re going to be the one inside it.”

“Life and death are just flip sides of the same coin,” I say, and I turn to find him staring at me. “What?”

“I was just thinking that maybe you never really stopped your studies after all.”

We pass by the giant El Minya sign, wedged incongruously into the rock cliffs like the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. As Wyatt tries to find a parking spot, I watch two men holding hands, walking down the street. It doesn’t mean what it does back home. Here, it’s just a sign of friendship. Legally, in Egypt you cannot be gay.