“If you teach me how to do it,” I suggest, “then maybe I won’t even have to bother you.”

He glances at me. I watch his hands flying over the keyboard, and then I hear the ding on my iPad that lets me know the file has been sent back to me. “Prego,” he says flatly. You’re welcome.

Joe, who is cataloging his flints, catches my eye and shrugs.

Suddenly the air changes in the room. Wyatt stalks into the communal work area with his cellphone pressed to his ear. “I don’t give a damn,” he fumes. “If you want the paperwork, then you have to provide the paperwork—”

He streaks out the doors onto the porch and the doors close behind him.

I walk to the window, watching Wyatt pace and rant on the porch. It strikes me how lucky we had it, fifteen years ago—to be Dumphries’s pawns, instead of the Mudir, the director in charge of everything. It makes me wonder: while we were trapped in our own story, what was the one Dumphries was living? Did he know, then, that he was sick? That he was racing against time to publish his work before he stepped down from his post at Yale?

Wyatt looks regal and demanding, the sun anointing him, frustration billowing out behind him like royal robes. He jams the phone back into his pocket and braces his arms on the stone balcony. For a moment, he bows his head.

I am filled with the overwhelming desire to step out there, touch his arm, rub his shoulders. To take some of the responsibility away just long enough for him to breathe again.

I tell myself that it’s because of what I do for a living—I’m used to helping people. Wyatt does not need my support; it’s the other way around.

But when he turns, his eyes find mine through the window with unerring accuracy, as if he knows I’ve been there all along.

* * *

—

AFTER THE SUN sets, Wyatt brings a bottle of cognac up to the roof and holds a meeting, explaining to his team how the excavation will be done, step by step. Wyatt, of course, will be the first one inside. Joe is in charge of making sure the generator is working—since it will be dark in the burial chamber, we need portable electricity for lighting. Alberto will be on hand to photograph everything in situ, before it is removed. “Dawn,” he says, “you’ll be with me.” Before Alberto can open his mouth to complain, he adds, “She’s smaller than the rest of us, and given how tiny the chamber seems to be, she may very well be the only one who can maneuver around the coffin.”

No one is brave enough to contradict him.

Alberto gets up and lights a cigarette, then tosses the match off the roof.

“My mother used to say you should never light three cigarettes off one match,” I murmur.

Wyatt turns to me. “Another superstition?”

“No, actually. It came from her dad, who was in the war—if you kept a match lit that long the enemy would see the flame and shoot you.”

Wyatt refills his glass. “Here’s to the knowledge that keeps us alive.”

I shake my head. “If being a death doula has taught me anything, it’s that we know nothing about life. At least not till it’s too late.”

“Evidence,” Wyatt barks.

“Well, you have to be near death to understand why life matters,” I say slowly. “Otherwise, you don’t have the perspective. You believe you have the time to put off that phone call you haven’t made to your mother. You let an old argument fester. You fold down the page in a travel magazine and tell yourself one day, you’ll get to Istanbul or Santorini or back to the town where you were born. You have the luxury of time, until you don’t—and then it becomes clear what’s most important.”

An awkward quiet settles. “Wow,” Joe says after a moment. “You must be a real hit at cocktail parties.”

I look at him. “What keeps you up at night?”

Joe frowns. “Climate change?”

“Something more personal,” I ask.

“I’m a pretty chill guy—”

“You rub the lamp and the genie says, I’ll answer one mystery for you and only one mystery. What is it?”

“Why did my dad leave?” Joe blurts out.

“You’re not going to know that on your deathbed,” I say gently. “Not unless you use your life to figure it out.”

Alberto narrows his eyes. “Is that why you’re here?”

I pin him with my gaze. “I know why my dad left,” I reply, deliberately misunderstanding. “He was deployed, and then he died in a helicopter crash.”

Alberto grinds his cigarette beneath his boot. “Maybe what you know isn’t as important as what you don’t know, right?” He gives Wyatt a pointed look before he walks downstairs.

Joe stands up. “Guess I’m gonna go figure out what I did to make my father disappear,” he mutters, and he leaves.

“I should apologize to him.” I bend my knees, groaning. “I’m an idiot.”

Wyatt shrugs. “No, actually, you’re quite bright. But your sense of tact could use a polish.”

“Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember not everyone spends all day with people who are dying.”

“True,” Wyatt says. “Some of us spend all day with people who are already dead.” He nudges my shoulder. “Besides, you’re not wrong. It’s why the Coffin Texts even existed. What’s the point of life, if not to accumulate knowledge?”

I glance at him, surprised. “That’s absolutely not the point of life. It’s who your existence snags on. Who changes, because they knew you. There’s not a single tomb without art that represents a relationship—a father and his children, a man and his wives, even a noble and his citizens. What you know isn’t nearly as important as who you know. Who will miss you. Who you will miss.”

Wyatt studies me. “Who misses you?” he asks quietly. “Whom do you miss?”

Since that first day, we have not talked about Meret, but suddenly I miss her so fiercely that everything in me aches. I look at Wyatt, while the call to prayer runs over us like a river.

I imagine Re ducking underground, slipping into the corpse of Osiris as if he’s wrapping himself in a blanket.

I think about why I came here.

I think of all the people whose hands I have held while they step off a cliff, into the unknown. Each time, I am floored by the bravery of humans. Each time, I am aware of what a coward I am.

“I miss lots of things,” I say lightly. “Food without sand in it is at the top of the list, right now.”

“Ice cream.”

“Air-conditioning.” I laugh.

“Well, there are some lovely hotels in Egypt. Or so I hear.”

“I didn’t come for a vacation.”

“Right,” Wyatt says, tightening the trap he’s laid. “What did you come for?”

I hesitate. “Clarity.”

He tilts his head. “I may be completely off the mark here, but my guess is that you left a comfortable home with a daughter and a husband who love you to prove something to yourself.”

“You’re partially right,” I admit, hedging. “I wanted to be an Egyptologist ever since I was little, and I fucked that up.”

“There’s a host of things I wanted when I was a child that never came to pass,” Wyatt counters.

I give him a sympathetic glance. “Friends?”

He whacks me on the shoulder. “No. But…French fries.”

“You never had French fries?”

“Not the kind you get from a drive-through,” Wyatt says. “Mine were pomme frites. And I wanted the kind of birthday cake with little sprinkles in the batter.”

“Funfetti?”

His face lights up. “Yes. I saw it once on a television show.”

I burst out laughing. “Are you really complaining because you had a private chef?”

“Grass is always greener, right? I truly think I missed out on a childhood rite of passage because I never had a cake that came out of a box.”

“I forget you were born with that silver spoon up your—”

“Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever had a proper party. My birthday was always during the school term,” Wyatt says. “I think once my mother had a cake shipped to me. From Fortnum’s. But that was because she canceled a visit to see me to go to France instead.” He shrugs. “That’s the thing about being obsessed with the past. It keeps you from having to notice the present.”

He is speaking lightly, words running like mercury, just like mine were when I didn’t really want him to look too closely at my responses. Even so, I’m reminded of who Wyatt truly is, and not what he projects into the world.

“You’re the marquess now,” I state. “So why haven’t you gone back to England?”

“Turns out being the director of an Ivy League program is a much more acceptable profession than being a fledgling Egyptologist.”

We both stare over the lip of the balcony at the cheek of the horizon, and the blush of the moon. “Your father, was he alive when you took over at Yale?”

“He was,” Wyatt says. He fishes his phone out of his pocket and cues up the voicemail. “He called me and left a message. Honestly, I think he probably had to get my number from my mother, since he’d never done that before. I didn’t answer—not because I was busy, but because I didn’t know how to have a conversation with the man.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know. Never listened.”