I snap the fitted sheet over the mattress, erasing them. A small cloud of dust rises as I make the bed, and I cough a little as I lie down and stare at the ceiling.

There’s a water mark in the shape of Ohio, and I wonder if the pipes burst at some point. When I had been here during the season, we’d trudge back to the Dig House and race to be the first to take a shower before the electricity cut out, gingerly stepping into the stall because the water was so brutally hot—you could actually see the fire when the heater turned on in the boiler. Shaving my legs had been physically painful, and I could remember waving the razor in the air to cool it down before setting it on my skin. The water spread all over the floor, so you’d have to squeegee it to the drain before relinquishing the bathroom to the next person.

Then I would sit with the pottery specialists as they sifted through buckets of curated sand, talking to the younger grad students who tried to put broken sherds together like a three-dimensional puzzle; or I’d pass time with the bone specialists going through the huge backlog of material in the magazine. Excavation is often fast, but analysis is slow.

Since there was no television, in the evenings Dumphries would do dramatic readings aloud from a Jackie Collins novel. I remember how it wasn’t until I came to Egypt for a dig with him that I began to think of him as human, rather than as a demigod. In close proximity, you couldn’t help but see someone’s eccentricities and flaws—the way Dumphries took six sugars in his morning coffee or snored loud enough to wake Osiris, or how he giggled when he read the word erection in Hollywood Wives.

When I came to Egypt each season, I’d brought the fattest books I could find, hoping to make my entertainment last. My first season was Russian lit, my second season was David Foster Wallace. In 2003, I was reading fantasy.

One afternoon, Wyatt poked his head into my room as I was lying on my bed with one of my novels. “What are you doing?” he asked.

I didn’t even let my eyes flicker from the page. “Skydiving,” I said.

“Science fiction?” he asked, looking at the cover.

“Fantasy.”

“There’s a difference?”

I didn’t answer, hoping he would just go away.

“What’s it about?” Wyatt asked, coming in and sitting on the edge of the bed.

It was a love story, but I wasn’t about to give Wyatt that weapon. “Two brothers,” I told him. “One who is raised to be a king, and one who finds out in this chapter that he’s the true heir.” Wyatt didn’t take the hint. Instead, he plucked the book out of my hand. “Hey!”

He scrolled through it, his eyes lighting on the paragraphs I’d underlined. I always did that in books, when authors found ways to say the things I never could. “?‘You can plan for something your whole life, and still get taken by surprise,’?” he mused. “?‘And you can experience an earthquake and deal with it like you were born to have the ground vanish beneath you.’?” He cut me a glance. “I guess that’s the moral of your story. You never know.”

He had tossed the book lightly at me, but it was so thick that when it landed on my belly, I grunted. He was gone before I could ask him what he meant.

Now I don’t have any novels for diversion. I could finish reading Wyatt’s dissertation, I suppose. Given the fact that he’s just hired me, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

I pad through the Dig House, which is dark and empty. I can hear tinny radio music in the personal living quarters of the Egyptians, and smell the faint scent of smoke. In the library, the stack of books I had set on the floor is exactly where I left them. I slide Wyatt’s bound dissertation under my arm.

“What are you doing?”

The unexpected voice makes me jump. I turn around to find Alberto staring at me, his hands in his pockets.

“Finding something to read?” I say, but even I hear the question mark in my own words, as if I’m guilty of something.

Alberto’s eyes are dark and assessing. He looks at the book tucked under my arm and then back at my face. “So you’re on the payroll now.”

“Well. Sort of. I mean, I don’t expect to get paid. That’s not why I’m here.”

Then why are you? He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have to.

There is something unsettling about the silence he’s wrapped me in, like the unwitting fly caught in the spider’s web. I know he’s uncomfortable with me being here. I just can’t figure out why, unless it’s because he thinks I will slow down their progress.

Well. If that’s the case, then the best thing I can do is to prove to Alberto I’m a hard worker. I produce a smile. “Big day tomorrow. I’m off to bed.”

I can feel him watching me as I make my way back down the hall to my room.

I reach for my clothing on the nightstand and fumble for the phone in the pocket of my cargo pants. I turn it on, but there is no signal.

There’s a soft knock, and the door opens before I can respond. Wyatt leans in, his face limned in shadows, his eyes an abiding blue. He sees me holding the phone.

I feel my cheeks flush with heat. “Guess I should have upgraded to an international service plan,” I murmur.

“You have everything you need?” he asks politely.

I nod.

“Harbi will knock at four-thirty. Breakfast is at five in the main room.” He hesitates. “I’m not going to go easy on you.”

“I know.”

His fingers tighten on the doorjamb. “I hope you also realize that choosing to hide from the world in a tomb that’s bound to become a media circus may not be effective.”

“Noted.”

He glances at the book sitting beside me. “If you’re looking for something to pass the time I have far better material. There’s still some Jackie Collins around, I’m sure. Joe loves manga. Or you could try one of my later publications, after I succumbed to the joy of the Oxford comma.”

“That’s okay. I want to read this one.”

He inclines his head. The moon, spilling through a window in the hallway, silvers his hair and deepens the lines that bracket his mouth. For a moment, I can see his future.

“Sleep well, then.”

He says the words, but he doesn’t leave. It’s almost as if he doesn’t know how to put himself on the other side of the door. Years ago, when he snuck into my room, he would wedge the desk chair under the knob for privacy, barricading us in, together.

“Wyatt?” I say, my throat dry. “Thank you. For the citation.”

He looks up at me with such wonder that it is clear he included that footnote as an emergency flare, an SOS across continents and oceans. Finally, against all odds, it had found its recipient.

“You’re welcome, Olive,” he says, and he closes the door behind himself.

HARVARD SQUARE IS dissected by roads, an ill-fitting puzzle. The university is sprinkled across the sections, with a cluster of Georgian brick buildings in the main yard. This summer, Brian is teaching at their extension school. It’s good money and easy work, since the topics he covers are layman-friendly versions of the ones he gives to physics students during the academic year.

I slip into the rear of the lecture hall just as he puts up his first slide, and try to see him the way the others do.

Brian has jet-black hair, with silver threads only just starting to show. He’s tall and lean and rangy, and I know that at least one undergrad wrote an ode about his eyes—something that included a shaft of sunlight falling through a forest, and about which I’d teased him for weeks. He wears a professor’s uniform: wrinkled button-down shirt, rumpled blazer, khaki pants, Oxfords. He is the kind of guy whose collar you want to fix, whose jacket you want to smooth, whose hair you want to push out of his eyes, just so that he will look down at you, sheepishly, with a shared secret and a stealth smile that feels like a jolt to the heart.