He also got me a scratch ticket.

We had agreed that we would write up something simple—vows that would make this seem a little more special than just signing a piece of paper on a Tuesday afternoon. But when it came time, Brian turned pink from his neck to the tips of his ears. “I didn’t…I didn’t think we were going to say them out loud…”

What else do you do with vows? “That’s okay,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter.”

Really, no one else’s words mattered but my own. I smiled at Kieran, who was juggling Meret in his arms while Brian and I held hands. I looked Brian in the eye and promised to honor and cherish him. When we walked out into the waiting room after the ceremony, people cheered. It was like the DMV of Love.

Afterward, we went to an Italian restaurant. We took turns going to the bathroom so that Kieran wasn’t left alone at the table. In the restroom, I took out the vows I had written but not spoken during the ceremony—in hieroglyphs, and in English. From my Yale class notes I had copied a piece of a New Kingdom poem called “The Flower Song”:

Hearing your voice is sweet as pomegranate wine!

I live but to hear it!

If I could gaze upon you with every glance,

It would be more beneficial to me than eating or drinking.

I threw them out with the towel I used when I washed my hands.

When Brian went to the bathroom, I used a dime to rub off the scratch ticket.

We didn’t win.

That night after Kieran went to bed, Brian touched me as if I were made of glass, as if moving too quickly or holding me too close would make me disappear. Afterward, while he lay on his side and stroked the parabola of my shoulder, he gave me a piece of paper.

“These are my vows,” he said.

“I thought you couldn’t write them.”

“I couldn’t speak them,” he corrected.

    9x?7i>3(3x?7u)

I was used to Brian talking about scientific concepts way over my head. It didn’t look familiar, like the vector for acceleration or the theory of relativity. “Am I supposed to know what this is?”

“Solve for i.”

I sat up, letting the sheet fall away from me. I rummaged in the nightstand, where I couldn’t find a pen but did manage to unearth a crayon.

    9x?7i >3(3x?7u)

9x?7i>9x?21u

“Now what?”

Brian reached over and wrote ?9x on each side of the equation.

    ?7i>?21u

Solve for i, I thought.

Then I smiled.

    i<3u

Just before I fell asleep in Brian’s arms, I asked, “Do you ever wonder if the reason your grandmother had to die, and my mother got sick, was so that we’d find each other?”

He hugged me closer, speaking against my skin. “I would have found you, no matter what.”

I had fallen asleep on my wedding night wondering what might have brought a physicist to Egypt, had my mother not died, and if Brian had to cross paths with me there. Or what might have made an Egyptologist seek out a physicist to learn more about the past.

Now, in the heat of Egypt, I pull out the burner phone that Wyatt has given me. It is almost 7:00 P.M. in Boston. The service is spotty out here in Middle Egypt, but Brian picks up on the first ring.

“Hello?” he says in the flat voice he saves for telemarketers, for phone numbers he does not recognize.

“Brian, it’s me.”

“Dawn,” he breathes. “Dawn? Are you all right? Where are you—”

“I texted Meret. I told her to tell you I was okay.” I wince, realizing how stupid this sounds. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

“Jesus Christ, Dawn. It’s been days. You said you’d be back soon…I thought you meant right away.”

I swallow. “I thought I meant that, too.”

There is a scuffle, and then quiet, as if Brian has shut himself inside a closet. “I don’t understand,” he says, his voice running the ragged edge of panic. “Please. Come home.”

I rub my temple. “I can’t, yet.”

There are tears pushing behind his words. “Is everything okay?”

My throat feels hot and swollen. If being here is right, then why does it hurt so much to listen to Brian?

There is a soft knock just as I say Yes into the phone.

The door of my room opens. “Dawn,” Wyatt says, unraveled. “What you said upstairs—” He stops, seeing the phone pressed to my ear, realizing that my response was not to him.

“Who is that?” Brian asks.

I do not take my eyes from Wyatt’s face. From the stiffness of his body, I know he has guessed who I might be talking to.

“It’s nobody,” I whisper, and Wyatt’s expression shutters.

“I have to go,” I say into the phone, but the connection has been lost.

Wyatt and I are frozen in a sick tableau, unsure of what either of us is supposed to say or do now. He came to me because he couldn’t sleep. I called Brian for the same reason.

What does that even mean?

I slide the phone under my thigh. “I was…calling home,” I tell him.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he says, with a formality that feels like the moat around a castle. He bows his head; the door closes with a click.

I was, I think.

I am.

* * *

—

WYATT IS ALREADY gone by 4:30 A.M., having left for the site to greet Mostafa and to organize the day’s work. I wonder if he slept at all.

I wonder if, like me, he was running the lines of last night’s conversation through his head.

The atmosphere is silent, but electric. The rest of us rush through our breakfast and pack our gear and hurry to the tomb. Today is the day no one wants to be late.

At the site I see Wyatt almost immediately, standing in the glow from a generator-powered lamp. He is bent over paperwork that Mostafa holds, but he looks up when he hears us all enter. “It’s about time,” he says shortly, even though we are fifteen minutes earlier than usual. He begins to bark out orders, reinforcing the jobs he outlined last night. My name is the last one he calls. “Dawn,” he says. “You’re with me.”

I give a quick nod to Mostafa and fall into step behind Wyatt, who is already moving. He doesn’t look back at me, doesn’t speak.

All business then, as though last night never happened.

But this is not the time or the place for that conversation, and anyway, I am the one who cut Wyatt off last night. If he is treating me like a research assistant, like a grad student lucky enough to be in the distant orbit of this discovery, I have no one to blame but myself.

Wyatt stops near the safety fence that has been constructed around the mouth of the shaft. Several local workmen are speaking rapidly in Arabic, pointing and arguing over the best way to secure the ends of a long rope ladder. The rungs curl into the dark pit like the tongue of a viper. Because of the low ceiling of the tomb chapel, it isn’t possible to angle a metal ladder down the shaft, and this is the alternative. Wyatt easily climbs over the wooden barrier, bracing his hips on the inside. I watch him tug on the rope and then hook one boot and the other, heading down. When his head is level with the floor of the tomb chapel, he glances up at me. “Problem?” he asks.

I shake my head and climb over the safety fence.

I wait until the rope ladder goes slack, which means Wyatt has reached the bottom.

His voice floats up to me. “The chamber seems undisturbed,” he says.

I step onto the first rope rung, feeling it swing under my weight. I look at the two men who are holding the stakes in place. The shaft leading down to the burial chamber is about eighteen feet deep, and fairly narrow. I take a deep breath and begin to crawl beneath the surface of the earth, willing them to not let me fall.

It is like sliding down the parched throat of the world. The deeper I go, the darker it is. Wyatt’s headlamp flickers at the base of the shaft, a pinprick I’m driving toward. As the light falls away above me, I imagine the walls are contracting, that I’m being swallowed.

Maybe halfway down, the ladder slips.

I give a small shriek and grab on to the rope and feel my shoulder scrape against the shaft. Wyatt yells in Arabic, and the rope goes taut again. “Ana asif!” I hear above me—a fervent apology.

My shoulder is bleeding, I think. I don’t even have enough room to bend my arm and touch it to see.

“Dawn?” Wyatt calls.

“Yeah,” I say, my heart hammering, my palms slick. “Be right there.”

But I don’t move.

The shaft at this level is only slightly wider than my hips. What if the ladder falls completely? What if there isn’t enough air for both me and Wyatt by the time I get to the bottom? What if—

“Dawn,” Wyatt says, “I want you to listen to me.”

“All ears,” I grind out.

“Take one more step down.”

I give a tiny shake of my head, and my boot slips. I hear loose limestone rubble strike the bottom of the shaft, Wyatt curses as grit hits his face.

“Did you ever hear about Archie Hall?” he asks.