“You see what I’ve let you see,” she scoffs.

A dog owner hurls a ball, which bounces high enough to jump the fence. Win catches it before it can crash into her. She holds it up, as if surprised to find it in her hand. She turns it over like it is a Fabergé egg.

“Did you ever wonder who you would have been, if you hadn’t become who you are?”

I take the ball and lob it over the fence. “You mean like a center fielder?”

“No,” she says. “You know what I mean. I know you do.”

There are moments that feel more like spun sugar than time. A summer evening on a stretch of grass, when your tongue is blue with the heart of a Popsicle. A heartbeat when a hummingbird stops moving long enough to look you in the eye. A first kiss. A star flashing once in the sky before the sunrise. A goodbye. Blink, and it’s like it never happened.

“What if I want to be remembered by someone who may not remember me?” Win asks.

I wait for her to continue.

“I grew up in New York City. I was a good painter; I already knew that. When I was a freshman at NYU, a gallery owner saw my work at a student show and wound up representing some of my paintings. When I was a junior I went to study for a semester in Paris. I took an art class, and the professor was constantly standing behind me, criticizing this line or that intention. He said I was too technical, as if that could be a thing. I went to his office hours to tell him he was an asshole, and he brought me back to the studio. He tied a rag around my head like a blindfold, and told me to paint how he made me feel.” She twists the fabric of her dress in her hands. “I didn’t know how to do what he was asking, and he wouldn’t shut up, so I picked up the palette and threw it across the room. He ripped the blindfold off, and he was smiling. Now we’re getting somewhere, he told me.

“What I drew that night—I’d never done anything like that before. It wasn’t just art. It wasn’t measured or literal. It was like being a medium, and having spirit pour out of you. I started spending all my time in the studio. I met my professor for coffee. We were inseparable, even though he was twice my age. He took me to the Louvre; we’d have a scavenger hunt for the artist who was most in love with his subject, or for the mangiest dog, or ugliest Madonna. He taught me how to copy the masters and then to deconstruct them. And one day he asked if he could paint me.

“He set up the studio and locked the door. He sat me down near a window. First he did sketches, and we talked about stupid things—how the prime minister was caught with his mistress, where the best falafel could be bought. He couldn’t get it right. He was more and more frustrated. He asked me to close my eyes. I heard him get up and move, could smell the coffee on his breath. Then I felt the lightest stroke on my forehead. Down my nose. Over my cheek and chin and lashes. I opened my eyes, and he was painting me, just like he had asked. But with a dry brush. Tracing my ear and my jaw and my throat and my lips.”

She holds her breath, lets it out in a rush. “You know where this is going,” Win says. “I got pregnant. I was going to tell him, but then I found out he was married. And his wife was also due to have a baby in a couple of months. So I left.”

I look down between my bent knees.

“You’re judging me,” she says.

“No.”

“I like to believe I loved him so much that I couldn’t make him choose. But mostly, I think I was afraid to find out who he’d pick. I came home and wore baggy clothes until I couldn’t hide it anymore. I told my parents I was dropping out of school to have the baby, and that the father was a one-night stand I’d met in a club in Paris. A few years later, I married my driver’s ed instructor. Clearly, I have a pattern, falling for authority figures.”

“Felix,” I say.

“Yeah. I loved him. I love him. But I never forgot about Thane.” She stares directly at me. “I want him to know that. I want him to know that Arlo…was. I want that before neither of us is in the world.”

Win reaches up and pulls the scarf from her head. She runs her hand over her smooth scalp. “There’s so little left, already,” she says. “Before it’s all gone, I want him to remember me.”

My lips feel stiff. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“A legacy project,” Win says. “I want to write Thane a letter. I want you to find him and deliver it by hand.”

I stare at her, silent.

“I’ve thought a lot about what my life would have looked like, if I hadn’t left,” Win says. “Even though I was the one who made the decision.”

I feel a wash of heat. “What about Felix?”

The corners of her mouth turn up. “I don’t think he’d really be up for that errand.”

“You can’t hide this from him. He loves you so much.”

“And I love him,” Win insists. “Enough to not hurt him any more than I already am by dying.” She pulls at my sleeve. “Please?”

No, I think. Too close. This is crossing a line; this is unethical; this is wrong.

But I also hear the very words I spoke to Felix minutes ago: You don’t stop loving someone just because they’re not physically with you.

I get up and face the dog park. Two mutts are chasing each other in circles. “I can’t give you an answer right now.”

One dog nips the other’s tail. He yelps and scurries away from a friend who became an enemy. “Dawn,” Win begs. “Isn’t there someone in your life who got away?”

* * *

—

IT TAKES ME hours to sort through the boxes in the attic. At one point Meret comes up, sees a bin full of baby clothing, and exclaims her way through it—reliving a dress with a giant squirrel on it, and a onesie with bumblebee stripes. We find Brian’s mother’s wedding gown, yellowed in a sealed box. There are yearbooks from Brian’s college years, his ears sticking out like saucers and his hair too long.

“What are you looking for?” Meret asks.

“I’ll know if I find it,” I tell her.

She leaves not long after, which is good, because I cannot explain to her what I am searching for.

It is so hot in the attic that sweat pours off me, streaming down my neck and soaking my tank top. I wipe my face with the back of my arm. It is hotter than hell in here. It might as well be Egypt.

I find it buried under a crate of books: Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar and an early translation of the Book of Two Ways and thick volumes in German and Dutch and French that I used to be able to read for research. Wrapped in a dish towel with blue edging is a limestone flake, almost triangular, its edges ragged. One side of it has been crushed under the weight of the tomes, but the writing is mostly intact, scrawled in black marker. I do not remember all the hieratic, but I don’t have to, because I know the translation by heart.

I shall kiss [her] in the presence of everyone,

That they might understand my love.

She is the one who has stolen my heart—

When she looks at me it is refreshment.

AS IT TURNS out, Wyatt is not ready to excavate the burial chamber the next day, or the day after that. The first delay has something to do with the integrity of the shaft and shoring up the sides. The second delay has to do with the schedule of Mostafa Awad, the director of antiquities who has to be present before the chamber is opened. This means that Wyatt prowls around the Dig House and the site like a wounded bear, finding fault in everyone and everything. Joe says that when Professor Armstrong gets like this, it’s in everyone else’s best interests to get very, very absorbed in their own work.

I have had only two moments of interaction with Wyatt privately. The first was at the end of my very long first day, when he was unloading the Land Rover and handed me a tripod to carry back to the Dig House. “How did it go?” he asked, and I smiled broadly and told him it was great. The second was when he knocked on my door at 4:30 A.M. and unceremoniously tossed two pairs of women’s khakis and two long-sleeved linen shirts on my bed, along with some white cotton underwear and wool socks. “Thank you,” I said, wondering who had been dispatched to get me a change of clothing, if it had been Wyatt’s directive. He had merely grunted, “I want my shirt back.”

It wasn’t until I began sorting through the clothes that I realized he had also bought me a burner phone, the cheap kind sold at street stands in Cairo, which had international service.

After the end of my second day in the tomb, I finish drawing the hieroglyphs closest to the shaft entrance and give them back to Alberto to input digitally. He is the only person in the Dig House who is cool to me, even though I try to be as cheerful and amenable as humanly possible. That afternoon, while we are all back at the Dig House avoiding the blister of afternoon, I find him at his computer. “Hi. I was wondering if you finished my file?”

“I’m kind of in the middle of something.”