He grabbed a book from his knapsack—Newberry’s publication of the tomb from 1895, and scrolled to a page. “There’s a block in the Cairo museum that’s been attributed to this tomb by Fraser.”

I leaned over his shoulder, listening to him translate a column of hieroglyphs. “The Ankhet, his beloved one…who wins his praise…daily,” Wyatt read.

I stared at the signs in the book, then took the Sharpie from his hand. With the cap on, I drew in the dirt floor of the tomb.

“You’re saying this means courtesan,” I said, redrawing the hieroglyphs for Ankhet: the ankh, the n of water, the kh of placenta, the t of the bread loaf.

“But we know for sure these hieroglyphs aren’t always crystal clear.” I held out my hands as scales. “Aleph vulture?” I offered as an example. “Or tiw buzzard?” I bent down to the dirt again. “So let’s say that Newberry made a tiny error transcribing the sign in 1895.”

I wiped away the third sign, replacing the third h with the very similar niwt, the sign for city.

“If you make one little artistic correction, the whole meaning changes,” I said. “It’s a female citizen now. A married woman who has a town council position. The opposite of a concubine, basically.”

Wyatt looked at me, nonplussed. Then he burst out laughing. “Well done, Olive. If only the status of women today could be elevated due to a grammatical error.”

In the distance we could hear the muffled loudspeaker of the midday call to prayer, vying for dominance over the Coptic church bells. He rolled to his feet, extending a hand to pull me up. “Come on. We’re going to miss all the gourmet offerings.”

The moment we stepped out of the tomb, the light and heat shrank around us like a second skin. I wrapped my scarf around my head as we picked our way down the necropolis to the gaffir’s hut. Hasib had packed a field lunch of bread, peppers, and tomatoes, and some of the other grad students already sat with Dumphries. “Thought we’d lost you in there,” he said, as I sat down cross-legged. I took a pita and began to mash a Laughing Cow cheese onto it as Dumphries passed me his coveted personal stash of Asian five-spice. My first bite was full of sand, as usual.

I watched Wyatt spread peanut butter on a pita. “Professor Dumphries,” I asked, “what’s the word for a group of lemurs?”

“Why do you—oh, hell, I don’t care,” he said. “It’s called a conspiracy.”

Wyatt looked up at me and grinned.

* * *

—

ON THE WAY back to the Dig House is the Rameses Café, a little open-air hut set like an oasis in the middle of the desert, with picnic tables beneath a thatched, patchy roof. There is a cat yowling on the elbow of the road in front of the restaurant, faded framed advertisements for Egyptian beer on the corrugated metal wall, and absolutely no customers. Wyatt suggests we stop for lunch, and then laughs when he sees my face. “It’s fine,” he insists. “I’ve eaten here many times on my way back from Minya, and I’m still standing.”

I sit across from him at one of the tables, resting my elbows on the sticky red-and-white checked plastic tablecloth. Wyatt takes off his hat and sets it beside a roll of paper towels and a basket of cutlery, then squints up at the thatch. “Once,” he says, “I was here with Dumphries, and there was a cat on the roof with diarrhea.”

“I do not want to know how that story ends,” I say.

“Neither did Dumphries,” Wyatt replies.

“I once read that he taught his dog how to read Middle Egyptian.”

“That’s true. But only the twenty-four uniliteral signs,” Wyatt says. “And yes, she was a basenji. She always messed up k and t.”

In all fairness, they were quite similar.

“The obituary you wrote in the Yale Alumni Magazine was perfect,” I tell him.

Wyatt studies me. “So the alumni association was able to track you down.”

I hear all the words he is not saying: He couldn’t. Or maybe he never tried.

Lightening my tone, I shrug. “I think Yale would call out the CIA to find alums, just for the capital giving campaigns.” Then I look up at him. “It must have been hard for you. When Dumphries died.”

“I spent a lot of nights wishing for his position,” Wyatt admits. “But I’ve spent more nights wishing that I’d had several more years to learn from him first. I was thirty-six when I took over as the head of the department. It’s been seven years and there’s a good percentage of the Egyptology community that thinks I’m still cutting my teeth in the field.”

“Publishing the new tomb should shut them all up.”

Wyatt raises a brow. “Such loyalty.”

“I’m trying to impress my new boss.”

He laughs. “You know, there was a time when you would have gotten on the first plane rather than let me give you orders.”

He has no idea how close to the bone his words strike. I force myself to meet his gaze. “I know you went out of your way for this. For me.” I hesitate. Now is the moment of reckoning; now is when I need to tell Wyatt why I am here. But it feels like the truth is at the top of a mountain, and I am standing at the bottom.

I am saved by the arrival of a waiter, who approaches us impatiently, as if we are the ones who kept him waiting. Wyatt asks for a Coke, and the waiter turns to me. “Can I have bottled water?” I ask.

The waiter shrugs dispassionately. “Why not.” He walks to a cooler and takes out a bottle, hands it to me. As Wyatt orders baba ghanoush and hummus, I twist the cap and accidentally spill water all over the waiter. He drops his pen, looks at me sourly, and heads back to the kitchen to place—and probably cook—our order.

Wyatt mops up the table with a paper towel. “An Egyptian would say if you spill water on someone, you won’t speak to them again.”

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure that waiter didn’t want to speak to me again anyway.”

“Are you still superstitious?” he asks. “Like your mom?”

Surprised, I glance at him. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

“I remember everything.” His voice is low, soft. It pulls at me. “Dawn. Ghosts don’t reappear after fifteen years. What’s going on?”

People do not get to rewind their lives, to rewrite the outcome. We make our beds, and we lie in them. Literally, in my case.

I have had a good life. I have loved, and have been loved. I have helped people. I’ve found a career—maybe not the one I intended, but one that has been rewarding all the same. If I die today, I would be able to say with honesty that I left this world a tiny bit better than how I found it.

I have had a good life. But, maybe, I could have had a great one.

How do I tell the man I left behind that I think I might have made a mistake?

“I’m not here to finish my dissertation,” I confess.

Wyatt nods, his eyes never leaving my face. “Then why come to Egypt?”

Because, I think. You’re here.

Because I didn’t get to see how this might have turned out. How I might have turned out.

Because if there is a garden of maybes, you are the invasive plant I can’t ever get rid of.

But instead, I shake my head. “I don’t know. My life is chaos.”

Wyatt is silent for so long that I think I’ve offended him. Maybe I seem like a whiny woman in the throes of a midlife crisis, or a bored housewife. Then Wyatt idly picks up the pen that the waiter left behind. “Does he know you’re here?”

I know who he is talking about. I shake my head.

Wyatt begins doodling on a folded piece of paper towel. “Chaos isn’t such a bad place,” he says, and he excuses himself to go to the bathroom.

On the napkin, he has drawn the hieroglyphic signs that write nun.

Chaotic waters, I translate, surprised that I can still decipher this. It could be referring to rain, or it could be referring to inundation. It can be positive, like when the Nile floods and waters the crops. Or it can be devastating, and demolish a city. Ancient Egyptians believed that the first and most necessary ingredient in the universe was chaos. It could sweep you away, but it was also the place from which all things start anew.

* * *

—

BECAUSE THE DIG House is not full of grad students as it would be during a true season, there is space for me. Harbi sets up a room down the hall from where I stayed fifteen years ago. When I step inside, there is a clean Disney Princess mattress on the bed frame, and a stack of folded white sheets. A flat pillow sits, thin-lipped, at the head of the bed. Someone has found me a tiny tube of toothpaste. The clothes I arrived in are folded neatly on the nightstand.

“Thank you,” I tell Harbi. I sit down as he closes the door behind himself, and run my palm over Cinderella and Prince Charming, Beauty and the Beast, Aurora and Prince Phillip, Ariel and Prince Eric. All these happily ever afters.