“You—what?”

He looks down at the glowing green screen. “I couldn’t,” he says softly. “At first because I was afraid I might still be a disappointment. And then—after he died—because I was afraid that maybe I wasn’t.”

I know how something in you changes when a parent dies. You go about the rest of your days just like you have before, pretending you are fine, knowing it is all a lie. It isn’t until you lose a parent that you become an actor in the play of your own life.

I hold out my hand. “Give it to me.”

“No,” he says.

“I’ll listen for you.”

Wyatt’s eyes widen. “Absolutely not.”

“Why? Is this all some scam for pity? Is the message really from a restaurant in Cairo confirming your reservation on Friday at eight?”

Scowling, Wyatt passes me his phone. I press the little paused arrow and hold the phone up to my ear.

The voice is much like Wyatt’s, but deeper and grained, like old wood. I hear congratulations are in order.

A beat.

Well.

Well done.

Son.

I realize that his father could have simply left out that last word, and it would have been enough.

I hand Wyatt back the phone. “Your father wasn’t disappointed in his child,” I say. “Trust me.”

He slips it into his shirt pocket and fiddles with a button at his cuff.

“Like, how much of a not-disappointment?” Wyatt asks. “On a scale from one to Jesus?”

“You’ll just have to listen one day if you want to find out.”

“It’s pathetic, isn’t it. Forty-three years old and I’m still looking for a crumb of approval. Clearly that’s why I suffered under Dumphries for so long.”

I blink, and I can see Dumphries doing the fox-trot again with his wife. “Did he know? That he was sick?”

Wyatt glances at me. “I think so. But he didn’t tell me at first. I don’t know if it was because he was private, or because he wanted to make sure I was qualified for the job before he handpicked me to succeed him. Ironic, isn’t it? All that time he pitted us against each other, and in the end, he would have been better off served by you while he was dying by degrees.”

“I wasn’t a death doula then,” I point out.

“No,” he says. “You weren’t.”

“I wish I’d known. I would have liked to let him know what he meant to me.”

Wyatt turns so that he is facing me. “I tried to tell you.”

“Dumphries didn’t get sick until years after I left.”

“But I wrote you,” Wyatt says. “Daily, at first. They all were returned undelivered. When I was in New Haven again, I emailed you through Yale’s server—and they bounced. After that, once a year, I’d go to the alumni network and see if they had any forwarding information for you. But it was the damnedest thing. It was almost like Dawn McDowell never existed.” Wyatt stares at me. “I know why you left. I just don’t understand why you didn’t come back.”

I can feel all the blood rushing from my head, making me dizzy. Snail mail from Egypt was spotty at best, but even if it had reached Boston, I was at the hospice with my mother, too consumed by her illness to pay attention. When I moved in with Brian, he had patiently gone through a Rubbermaid tub of bills and junk mail and had paid whatever was outstanding and tossed out the rest. Were letters from Wyatt in there? Had Brian deliberately thrown them away?

By then, I was pregnant. Everything had felt so fragile—loss, love, life—that maybe he had just shoved aside whatever might have threatened the equilibrium.

I swallow. “I never got your letters.”

Wyatt takes my hand. He turns over my palm as if he is a special type of soothsayer who can read the past, if not the future. His fingers are scarred, warm, gentle. “I thought,” he says, “that you were avoiding me.”

I remember sitting at the airport with Wyatt, windshield wipers racing between us like a shared heartbeat. I remember thinking, I have to get out of this truck, and not moving. I remember running into my mother’s room at hospice, twenty hours of travel collapsing down to the head of an arrow as I ran to her bedside. I remember being in Boston, thinking that one of us should get to grab the brass ring of the life we wanted, and if it couldn’t be me, then at least it could be Wyatt.

Don’t do it, I tell myself.

Don’t.

But my thumb closes over his knuckles and my fingers curl around his. Every word I speak is ballast. “I didn’t know you were looking.”

I close my eyes and pull my hand away and stand.

“Big day tomorrow,” I say, and I do what I do best.

I leave him behind.

* * *

—

IN MY TINY room, I lie in my underwear on the princess mattress. It is still so hot, even at midnight, that the room seems to breathe with me. A fan wheezes on an overturned milk crate, blowing a tongue of faded yellow ribbon in my direction.

Whenever I’ve thought about my life, it has been before and after, scored on different fault lines: Egypt. My mother’s death. Meret. It’s like there is one Dawn who inhabited the space on one side of the division, and a different Dawn who inhabits the space on the other, and it’s hard for me to see how one evolved from the other. I wonder if this is a new fault line. I wonder if you can erase an old one, by going back to the spot where everything changed.

I have heard Brian expound upon this theory enough to realize that the answer is no; that we get no do-overs and whatever consciousness we are in negates the consciousness of any other timeline we might have traveled down. But surely that isn’t the case. The World War II vet who winds up getting his college degree fifty years late; the man who marries his elementary school sweetheart seventy years after they shared a peanut butter sandwich; the boy in a developing country who is orphaned by Ebola gets a medical degree, and goes back to his homeland to cure the disease. In all of those cases, Fate was fulfilled eventually. But even so, the recipient wasn’t who he had been at the beginning—wide-eyed and full of promise. By then, he’d lived. And when he was holding his diploma or his wife’s hand or his stethoscope, you can bet he was thinking, Well. That took forever.

Maybe Wyatt is not the only one who’s wrong about the point of life. Maybe it’s not about accumulating knowledge or accumulating love. Maybe it’s just about collecting regrets.

I can’t sleep, and find myself twisting my wedding band around my finger. I got married on a Tuesday afternoon, a little less than a year after my mother’s death. I did not actually ever tell Brian I would marry him. At the time, Meret was a few months old, and Kieran was used to seeing Brian as a father figure. His home had become mine: I no longer had to ask where the extra linens were kept or which drawer held the tiny screwdriver set for eyeglasses. When he casually suggested that we should make it official, because of things like taxes and health insurance, it made sense. We had settled into a comfortable routine; it wasn’t as if a piece of paper was going to change much of my daily life. By then, Wyatt was so distant in my mind, he might as well have been something I dreamed.

I did not know much about modern marriage. My own parents, after all, had never managed to tell me they never officially tied the knot. I wondered if there had been a reason for that, beyond my father’s family’s wariness about an Irish girl who spent so much time longing for the sea, she was only a shadow onshore.

Ancient Egyptian marriage, though, was not all that different from what Brian was offering. We have no record of what the ceremony was like, but scholars know it was an economic partnership: finances were combined, and the resulting house and children were the products of that merger. It was so professional, in fact, that as terms of endearment husbands and wives sometimes called each other “brother” and “sister”—not because of the incestuous overtones, but because in legal and financial terms, they split holdings equally. Even in divorce, Egyptian women could take a third of the property and full custody of the children. In fact, divorce law was so fair to women in Egypt that Greek women took Egyptian names, preferring to marry and divorce under Egyptian law.

A week after Brian brought up the idea of getting married over a pot roast and mashed potatoes, we sat in the waiting room. I held Meret, and Kieran sat between Brian and me. If the other people in the grotty, gray waiting room of the town hall were judging me, they had their own issues: there was a couple that didn’t look old enough to procreate, much less marry; and a woman in a sleek white suit who was holding a bouquet of sweet peas and whispering to a man old enough to be her grandfather.

Brian took one look at her and turned white. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and he bolted.

“Nice job,” Kieran said. “You scared him off.”

As it turned out, Brian had run down the street to a convenience store, because he realized that I should have flowers. He came back with a Cheeto-orange rose glued to a little plastic sign: GET WELL SOON. “It was all they had,” he apologized.