Wyatt finds a spot in front of a small shop selling ice cream. “Hungry?” he asks. “My treat.”

I am starving, in spite of the meal Harbi fed me. I walk up to the glass case, frost delicately etching the window. Strawberry, chocolate, orange blossom, coconut. I point to the Norio flavor—the Egyptian cookie knockoff of Oreo. Wyatt orders for me, the Arabic flowing easily off his tongue. The round hums and soft els make the words sound as if they are made of honey.

He hands me a cone, and suddenly I am back in my tiny bedroom at the Dig House, fifteen years ago. Wyatt had snuck inside when everyone else was asleep, brandishing a pack of Norios. “Where did these come from?” I asked, already tearing into the packaging.

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said, and he kissed me. “Sweets for my sweet.”

I rolled my eyes, intent on separating the cookie from the cream. I looked up to find him biting into a cookie, intact.

“Who does that?” I asked, truly shocked. “You’re supposed to split them apart.”

“Says who? The cookie Gestapo?” He popped another cookie, whole, into his mouth.

“That’s pathological,” I said. “Downright sociopathic.”

“Yes, I eat my Norios like a caveman, and I also am sewing a skin suit made out of undergrads I’ve murdered.”

“I don’t know if I can love you anymore,” I told him.

He stilled, a smile spreading, morning chasing night. “You love me?” he asked.

Now, I blink to find him holding out a napkin. “You’re dripping.”

“Thanks,” I say, and wrap my cone.

“I miss real Oreos,” Wyatt opines, starting down the street. “And having ice in my drink. And baths. Damn, it’s British as hell, but I miss baths.”

I fall into place beside him. I miss this, I think.

* * *

—

THERE IS A sign on the door of the antiquities office stating that the director is temporarily indisposed—which can mean he is out touring sites, helping curate museum collections, or doing general cultural heritage work—but that he will return, inshallah. The note does not, however, give a return time.

“Now what?” I ask.

“We wait,” Wyatt says. He steps into the shade thrown by the lintel of the doorway and squats down, tucking himself out of the sun and leaning his back against the locked door. He gestures to the spot beside him.

I rub the back of my neck. “Wyatt, no. You have a thousand things to do. You can’t just spend an afternoon sitting here till God knows when. We don’t even know if this guy is coming back.” I force myself to exhale. It’s one thing to ask Wyatt to try to get me clearance. It’s another to waste his time. “You tried, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that. But—”

“Dawn.” He extends a hand to me, shading his eyes with the other. I look down and have a crippling moment of déjà vu. “Stop talking.”

I reach for him, his fingers sliding around mine, dry and strong and so familiar that my chest squeezes. How can you go for over a decade without holding someone’s hand, and still have the feeling of it imprinted on you so firmly?

He tugs me down to a sitting position, shoulder to shoulder. “Firstly…” Wyatt winces. “Who says firstly? God, I sound like a complete wanker.” I smother a laugh, and he shakes his head. “I do have a thousand things to do. But I’ve been working around the clock and I’m the director and if I decide I need an afternoon’s break, so be it. Second”—he hesitates—“-ly: I don’t consider this a waste.” He traces a crack in the pavement with his thumb. “I owe you, Dawn. I would not have discovered this new tomb without you. So believe me when I say that if showing you my thanks means sitting on my arse for a few hours in downtown Minya, it is a small price to pay.”

I think about the citation he left me in his thesis. “I’m pretty confident you would have eventually found it whether or not you’d ever met me.”

“Wrong. It all started with that dipinto.”

I remember that afternoon. It had been so still that the world seemed to be in suspended animation, and we had been standing in a shaded hollow beneath a rock wall of the wadi where we did not have permission to be. I remember dusting the stone gently, and Wyatt running his finger beneath the hieratic, translating the bits of the inscription that he could read—including the mention of a tomb that had never been found at the Bersha site, in hundreds of years of excavation.

I remember Wyatt’s hand catching mine, squeezing so tight that it hurt, and me squeezing back just as hard.

“I looked for that tomb from 2003 till 2013,” Wyatt says. “And I found absolutely nothing. Dumphries let me do it, but I think it’s because he wanted me to realize I was on a fool’s errand. He had me nearly convinced that even if there was a Djehutynakht who was a distant early relative of Djehutyhotep II, there was enough damage to the rock inscription to cast doubt on whether his tomb was actually part of this necropolis, or somewhere else.”

The thing about archaeology is that it’s like baking a cake, one layer on top of another, with the most recent layer first and the oldest layer at the bottom. Your number one goal is to figure out what got put down when. You cannot be misled by someone who dug a hole into an older layer and pitched something into it. When you excavate, you aren’t finding brilliant, clear lost hieroglyphic text. You’re moving masses of mud. You’re finding broken pottery. You’re looking for the needle in a haystack of desert sand.

“It was 2013. I was standing at the top of Djehutyhotep II’s tomb, where we spent that last season. I was looking around, trying to figure out what the hell I had missed. And I thought about Howard Carter.”

“As one does,” I joked.

“Well, as one does when searching for ten years for something one can’t find.”

Carter had systematically looked for Tutankhamun’s New Kingdom tomb for a decade, to no avail. In 1922, his benefactor, Lord Carnarvon, said he was going to pull the plug on financing. Carter begged to check one last area—even saying he’d fund it on his own. Lord Carnarvon agreed to a final season, and Carter went to the tomb of Ramesses VI, which had been excavated a while back. He started to dig past the workmen’s huts associated with that tomb, on top of other debris, and found the steps to a second tomb buried beneath it.

“?‘At last, wonderful discovery in the valley,’?” Wyatt murmured, quoting the wire that Carter sent to Carnarvon when he found the corridor sealed with the stamp of the necropolis—a jackal over bound enemies. He then had to cover the buried steps and wait for Carnarvon to arrive, so the benefactor could see the tomb being opened, the fruits of his investment.

I look at Wyatt, understanding what he is trying to tell me. “Wait,” I say. “Really? Djehutynakht’s tomb was right beneath us all that time?”

He nods. “I’d looked everywhere, except where I was literally standing. So I dug down two feet from the entrance of Djehutyhotep II’s tomb and found the top of a lintel. There was enough autobiographical inscription on it for me to see the glyphs for Djehutynakht. A couple of weeks later, I’d uncovered the entry—painted with faux red-and-green granite and a seal of a giant scarab on the door. By then I’d read enough inscriptions to know that this was Djehutynakht, the son of Teti. He’s five generations removed from Djehutyhotep II, and one or two generations older than the Djehutynakhts in the Boston MFA. And he’s been referenced in nine other restoration inscriptions he left behind at different tombs in Middle Egypt.”

My jaw drops. “So he’s truly the granddaddy of the necropolis?”

“Most likely. He’s probably from the First Intermediate period, Eleventh Dynasty. He may be the immediate predecessor of Ahanakht I, the first known nomarch to have a rock-cut tomb at Bersha.”

“Evidence?” I demand.

He laughs. “We don’t have anything substantive, but I’m not the only one who thinks it. Given the dates of their existence as nomarchs, it fits. And we know for a fact that Djehutynakht liked going around Middle Egypt to other necropolises to fix up other people’s tombs, so it’s entirely plausible that he would start this necropolis area for his own family.”

“It also would explain why his name was written on the dipinto, as a sacred place officials might have come to spend the night before a festival,” I say.

“And,” Wyatt adds, “if there’s a Book of Two Ways in that coffin in the burial shaft, it would give him the earliest known version.”