“Mayflies have the shortest life span on earth. Like, twenty-four hours. Wouldn’t you feel terrible if you caused an even more untimely death?”

Wyatt looks at the fly. “What rotten luck. Well, mate, I hope you’ve had the best of days.”

I did, I think.

He pauses. “What do flies do?”

“Dance in groups and get it on with each other.”

“Clearly more evolved than we are, then,” Wyatt replies. “If you only have a little time, make the most of it.”

I cannot even meet his eyes.

“Olive,” Wyatt says quietly, balancing his elbows on the balustrade. “What really happened?”

There is no point in pretending I don’t know what he’s referring to. I lean back against the railing, so that we are facing in opposite directions. Which, I realize with a sad, smothered laugh, is just right. “I didn’t have a choice. My mother had cancer, and she’d kept it from me as long as she could. She was going into hospice.”

“I know why you left,” Wyatt says. “I want to know why you never came back.”

So this is what it feels like, a reckoning. When you have to push at the scar you try to keep hidden under scarves and coats and layers, and in doing so, you remember exactly what it felt like at the moment of injury. I feel gently along the fissure, the crack that separated my life from what I thought it would be to what it would become. What if, what if, what if.

“I had to be there for my mother.” My words ring with conviction, and I think again of Djehutynakht in the Hall of Two Truths, justifying the acts of his life. “And then I had to be there for Kieran.”

“Your…brother,” Wyatt says, pulling at a thread of memory.

“Yeah. He became a doctor,” I answer proudly. “A neurosurgeon.”

Wyatt shifts, so that he is looking at me. “And meanwhile…you…”

“Became a death doula,” I finish. “You know that already.”

But we both know that wasn’t what he was asking. His real question is about what I didn’t become. A doctor, myself. An Egyptologist.

His.

For years I told myself that this was about Brian, because of Brian. I told myself I was too ashamed to admit to Wyatt that I had turned to someone else so quickly. But this was never about Brian. It was about me.

“If you had gotten my letters,” Wyatt asks softly, “would you have come back?”

I face him, staring into those bright blue eyes that have always been the pilot light inside me. “I couldn’t.”

“Then I would have come to you.”

There was a world, maybe, where this worked. Where Wyatt finished his degree and got a job at a university and went off on digs a couple of times a year, thriving in a career I couldn’t have. In that world, I might have come to resent him for something that was never his fault.

In that world, I had not turned to another man—a good, kind man who made everything feel easier, rather than more tangled. In that world, I was not pregnant with that man’s baby.

In the real world, I chose safety and security over Wyatt.

My throat is throbbing, I try to explain all this, but I can’t. “You asked me why I’m here: because I thought this would be my life, and it wasn’t, and I needed to know what it would have been like. You, me, a dig site. A discovery. I know it was my choice to give it up. But I wanted to see, just once, what I was missing.”

I don’t even realize I’m crying until I feel Wyatt’s touch on my cheek, wiping away a tear. He rubs together his thumb and forefinger, as if my sadness could seep into his skin. “Maybe we did take the same path, in spite of it all,” Wyatt says. “You get close to people who inevitably leave you. The difference is that you call it work. I call it love.”

He walks downstairs into the Dig House. I don’t know how long I stand on the balcony, beneath the stars in a feverish sky. Long enough to stop crying, to be able to draw in a breath without feeling like I’m breaking apart.

The Dig House is still and silent. The only light in the main workroom comes from Alberto’s computer, a geometric screen saver that twists like a M?bius strip in the throes of pain.

I sit down at his desk and open a new browser tab. It takes a few minutes for my Gmail to load, and another ten seconds to filter out the messages in the mailbox I reserve for family.

Because I am a coward, I read Kieran’s first.

Dawn, Brian won’t tell me where you are. What the fuck?

It makes me smile; he doesn’t beat around the bush.

Dawn. Everyone’s freaking out.

Dawn. If you’re in trouble, just tell me.

When I open Meret’s messages, I start crying again.

Mom, Dad swore you’re okay but if you were really okay why wouldn’t you have come home by now?

Mom, if you’re really visiting your aunt in France like Dad says you are then send me a postcard because I think he’s lying. Also, I texted you a hundred times, why aren’t you writing me back?

Mommy. Did I do something wrong?

At that, I lose it. I bend over the keyboard, thinking that my sobs will probably short-circuit all of Alberto’s fancy software and that I don’t give a damn. I imagine Meret typing this on her laptop, the glow reflecting on her face.

I can’t remember the last time she called me “Mommy,” but I do remember the first time she called me “Mom.” I had picked her up from school in fourth grade, and she was bringing home a friend. Up until that point, she would reach for my hand every time we crossed the street, as if she didn’t know how to move forward without me. But that day when I reached for her hand to cross the parking lot, she tugged away, embarrassed. Mom, she said. I’m not a baby.

Except it doesn’t work that way. She will always be my baby, even when she has children of her own. I will never stop wanting to keep her safe. But I can’t do that when I’m half a world away.

The last email from her doesn’t have any text. It’s a photograph she has scanned of the two of us. I don’t even know where she’s found it—some album, I suppose, up in a box in the attic. Meret is maybe two, standing next to me on the beach. She is holding a starfish in her palm and looking up at the sky. Did it fall? she asked, just before Brian took the picture. I remember feeling my mother there, and if you look carefully in the photograph, there is a halo of spray that looks a little like the profile of a ghost.

It is not impossible that Meret was right about that starfish. I would have given her the heavens and the earth. I still would.

Finally, I take a deep breath and I open Brian’s messages, from oldest to newest.

Where are you?

Seriously, Dawn.

You probably think it’s enough to send some cryptic bullshit about you being fine and needing space and time and whatever but honestly, Dawn, this isn’t only about you anymore.

A day later: I didn’t mean that. I was angry. I take it back.

Then: I’ve been thinking that maybe you’re waiting for something, and that if you’re waiting for something, it’s probably for me to say I’m sorry. So, I’m sorry. But also, I’m sad. I’m confused. I’m scared.

Did you lie when you told me you love me?

There are several days with no messages, and then the last one:

I know you think I don’t listen to you half the time, that I’m in my own world, but you’re wrong. I do listen. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said before you left—that sometimes the past matters more than the present. Assuming that’s the hypothesis—it still can’t matter more than the future. Because otherwise, scientifically, we’d regress instead of evolving. Look. I’m not good with words. Or with noticing that things aren’t right. But I do know this: your state and my state are entangled. |me> = |us> The quantum state of me is us. Please, Dawn. Come home.

I curl my hands so that they are poised over the keyboard.

The first person I write back is Meret.

I miss you like crazy, I type.

I hesitate. I didn’t leave because of you, Meret, but you’re why I’m coming home.

Then I write Kieran just three simple words: I am fine.

I send another email to a social worker from the hospice, asking about a client.

Finally, I start an email to Brian. I type: I’m sorry, but then erase it. I’m not sorry.

I type: I didn’t mean to hurt you.

That sounds like a goodbye, so I backspace until the page is blank again.

I don’t know what to say, so I answer the question he asked me.

I never lied when I told you I love you.

I press send, watch the words fly from the screen. And I think: I just never told you the whole truth.

* * *

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