Desperate to avoid this runnel of conversation, I clutch the iPad to my chest. “Sounds like all the work’s going well. Do you really think you’ll get to the burial chamber by the end of today?”

He nods. “We may even get some of the men to dislodge the stone blocks at the bottom. Although then I have to technically wait for Mostafa to get here before I can go inside and see what’s what, and that may very well kill me.”

“Technically,” I repeat, and I know that Wyatt is thinking exactly what I am thinking—of another discovery, another inspector. Of rules that were broken.

“Have you found anything in the debris?” I ask.

He beams at me. “Nope.”

All the sand and dirt that is cleared from the shaft has been sifted by the workers, in case an amulet was dropped, or if there is a discarded floral collar or a broken shabti. The fewer funerary finds in the rubble, the more likely it is that this tomb has an intact burial—a coffin with a mummy that was never violated by grave robbers.

“Wyatt,” I say quietly. “That’s…”

“Fucking amazing. I know.”

I imagine how quickly his academic profile will rise, if this discovery pans out. I wait for jealousy to wash over me, but it doesn’t. This isn’t the life I chose to lead.

I find Wyatt staring at me like I am a crossword he cannot finish, even though he’s read all the clues three times over. I glance toward the tomb, where a line of local men are back to excavating buckets of sand, the white sails of their galabeyas like the sails of a fleet crossing an ocean.

“You know,” Wyatt muses. “To anyone else, the mystery would be the mummy eighteen feet under the ground. Not the woman who showed up in Egypt fifteen years late.”

I swallow. “I better get back to work.”

“No,” Wyatt says, the word striking like flint. Then he takes off his hat and grins. “I mean, I’ll put in a good word with your boss.”

Unsure of what he wants me to do, I sink down to the ground, cross-legged. He is sitting on a little folding stool, as if he’s the teacher and I’m the preschooler. “I guess this isn’t quite your usual workday,” Wyatt says.

“Yeah. And no,” I reply. “I mean, it’s not that different. The whole point of all this”—I wave toward the notched rock of the tomb—“was to prepare for a good death, right?”

“Amazing to think that’s become a cottage industry.”

“Why?” I ask. “Think of all the people who were employed building this tomb.”

“So you build twenty-first-century tombs,” Wyatt says. “They’re just not made out of rock.”

“Yeah. I suppose they’re made out of stories and conversations and relaxation techniques and wills. Obituaries. Social media passwords. Did you know that you can designate someone to cancel your social media accounts when you die so they don’t just keep telling everyone when it’s your birthday year after year?”

“This is why I’m not on Facebook.”

“I noticed,” I say, and then clap my hand over my mouth as if I could stuff the words back inside.

A smile plays along the edge of Wyatt’s mouth. “Did you,” he murmurs.

“Everyone knows how to die,” I say, shrugging. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t use a little support.”

Wyatt glances toward the tomb again. “Let me play Devil’s advocate, though. You don’t need a death coach—”

“Doula.”

“Doula. Not any more than you need a rock-cut tomb to become one of the blessed dead. If you couldn’t afford to have texts painted in your coffin, you could borrow papyri. Did you know that I found dozens of soul houses in Middle Kingdom cemeteries, right next to graves of the poor that are basically pits in the ground—a little model of a house and a few offering vessels, maybe with an onion or a loaf of bread. The point is that anyone could reach the afterlife, too. All you really needed to do was live morally.”

“Nothing’s changed in four thousand years,” I tell him. “The way to have a good death is to have a good life.”

“So, Olive?” he asks quietly. “Did you?”

My mouth seems filled with ash. “I’d like to think it’s not over yet,” I say lightly.

Wyatt looks away, so that his eyes aren’t pinning me anymore. “Well, as long as someone remembers you, you never really die.” I think of the names on the calendar in my phone—the phone that doesn’t work here. The litany of the dead I run through, daily, recalling one tiny detail of each of their lives: her perfect French manicure, his collection of foreign stamps, a beloved dachshund for whom she sewed bow ties. “Djehutynakht probably started building this tomb the minute he became nomarch,” Wyatt says. “He’s lucky it was ready by the time he took his last bow.”

“Every beginning is already the start of the end,” I reply. “I sound like a fortune cookie.”

“You always did see the big picture.”

“Wyatt Armstrong. Is that a compliment?”

He slaps his hat against his thigh. A tiny cloud of dust rises between us. “You were right. About the coffin, being a microcosm of the universe.”

“I know you finally realized that. I read your dissertation.” I lean down and pick up a flat piece of rock. “But still, could you etch that in stone for me?”

Wyatt laughs. “What you were saying all those years ago—it’s just the tip of the iceberg.” He stands, reaching out his hand to pull me up. “It’s crazy to think about, isn’t it? What might have happened if you and I had been working together back then, instead of against each other?”

I let myself go there, for the span of one breath: a perfect translation of the Book of Two Ways, with imagery and text interwoven. An understanding that the way to get to the afterlife wasn’t just about the inscriptions, but also about where they were placed in relation to the deceased.

A map with two paths; a key we both crafted.

“Let me walk you back,” Wyatt says. “We’re not being paid to drink tea.”

“Who is paying?” I ask. “Yale?”

He shakes his head. “They cut off my funding years ago. We’ve got a private benefactor now. Rich as fuck,” he admits, “but that’s sort of the way it’s always been, all the way back to Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon.”

We walk out of the tent into the heat; it feels like stepping into someone else’s mouth. “Aren’t you sort of Lord Carnarvon in this equation?”

“Not if you’re going by a bank statement,” he admits. “The one thing that the Athertons have excelled at is gradually squandering the family fortune.”

“Good thing you have Dailey,” I say. The benefactor’s name. When Wyatt looks at me in surprise, I shrug. “Joe talks a lot.”

He sees one of the workers flagging him down, and his eyes flicker over my iPad. “Back to it, then.”

I watch him disappear into a knot of workers, crouching down to look at something in a sieve. Instead of heading into the tomb, I double back, walking into the wadi. In the desert, this is the best you can do for privacy when you need to use the bathroom. I shimmy my borrowed pants down my legs, squat, and finish. I’m pulling them back up when my phone falls out of my pocket.

I pick it up and notice that, in this vast wasteland, there is a faint roaming signal.

I think of all the times I’ve told Meret to stop texting at the dinner table. I imagine her phone vibrating beside a bowl of mashed potatoes and her water glass.

Home soon, I type. I love you.

Tell dad I will be back soon.

I start toward the tomb, hesitating in the last shadow of the wadi. I think of what I’ve been tracing all morning. The last message left by a nobleman, who is now no more than dust.

I add: Forgive me.

* * *

—

THE DAY AFTER Wyatt kissed me was a Friday, and the reason I remember this is because we always had Fridays off. Dumphries was taking Bette to the airport in Cairo, and the other graduate students were driving to Tell el-Amarna to see the tombs of Akhenaton and Nefertiti. Normally, I would have gone with them—part of the joy of a dig season was using our few moments of freedom to explore other parts of Egypt—but Wyatt had announced at breakfast that he had to catch up on work. And no matter how much I wanted to see Amarna, I wanted to talk to Wyatt more. I wanted to tell him that whatever last night had been, it was never going to happen again.

He worked alone in his room all morning. I sat at the table in the common area, trying to figure out the three blank spots on a crossword someone else had already attempted, but mostly just waiting for Wyatt. When he did emerge from his room, it was shortly before noon, and he completely bypassed the common room. Instead, he banged out the front door.

By the time I got to the front steps of the Dig House, he was gone. I walked down the path that led to the Nile, passing small raised patches of barley and broad beans, but there was no sign of him. The other direction headed west into the desert, where we went when we were working. I frowned—he wasn’t allowed to visit the site alone, on a day off—but jogged lightly into the ripple of sand and heat.