Her fingers clutch at the bedding. “Letting go. All those times you read an obituary, or a neighbor tells you someone you know has died. It’s so bizarre to think that I’m that person now. That I’ll be the next one.”

“I know, Win,” I say simply.

“This world is such a mess. Who would have guessed I’d want so badly to stick around?”

“I would. Because, like me, you don’t give up easily.” I pull the piece of paper from my pocket and smooth it out.

Win picks up the printed photo. She brings it closer to her face, close enough to kiss. But instead she stares at Thane Bernard as if the world has just changed from black and white to color.

She rests against her pillow, the paper still clutched in her hand. She closes her eyes, and a single tear tracks down her cheek. “Dawn,” she says, “I’m going to write that letter now.”

ON PAPER, ANYA Dailey is the perfect partner for Wyatt. She is technically Lady Anya, a distant cousin to the queen or something like that, who was present at Prince William’s wedding and whose baby gift for Princess Charlotte was the first item of clothing in which she was officially photographed. She went to boarding school and then King’s College. She is on the boards of a dozen charities. Her father owns half of the land that London is built on.

She met Wyatt at the British Museum, where she was planning a fundraiser; Wyatt was giving a talk. She heard his voice as she walked by the auditorium, and as she put it, he was honey. She was the fly.

She had grown up hearing about Egyptology, because her grandfather had been friendly with the late Lord Carnarvon, and when she was a little girl he’d taken her to visit Highclere Castle, before it became a set for Downton Abbey. In the bowels of the building was a treasure trove of artifacts from Lord Carnarvon’s various concessions—the objects that hadn’t been sold to the Met. Her grandfather had been an Egyptomaniac; when he’d passed away, she’d thought: What better way to honor his memory than to invest in a current excavation? She had entered the relationship as Wyatt’s business partner. One thing led to another.

I learn all this within five minutes of meeting her.

I am bouncing along in the Land Rover, sitting in the back behind Anya and Wyatt because he has ordered Alberto and me to accompany them to the dig site. Anya wants to see the discovery her money has funded.

I am shooting daggers at the back of Wyatt’s head as he drives. I know why he wants Alberto there—so that they can get some press photo coverage of the benefactor and the archaeologist. But I cannot figure out why he wants me there, except to suffer.

Now that we’ve taken the most valuable treasures out of the tomb, there is only a gaffir at the site, dozing on a piece of cardboard at the entrance. “Sleeping on the job?” Anya murmurs, as Wyatt helps her out of the Land Rover. The gaffir scrambles to his feet. I wonder if she even knows what portion of her funding goes to this man—a pittance, really, that wouldn’t be considered a livable wage in a first-world country. “Mudir,” he says, nodding to Wyatt, opening the locked gate to the tomb so that we can get inside.

Because we have all been focused on the coffins back at the Dig House magazine, the generator that provides light in the tomb is off. It is stifling and dark in the main chamber, so I shine a floodlight on the painted walls. Wyatt translates some of the hieroglyphs when Anya points to a spot that interests her. When he starts talking about a scene of fishing and fowling, her eyes start to glaze over. Suddenly she jumps, crashing into his chest. “Spider,” she says.

Alberto and I look at each other behind her back, our first meeting of the minds.

When Wyatt begins to describe the excavation of the coffins, Anya peers down the tomb shaft. The rope ladder is still staked at the top, unraveling its way down. “Come, I’ll show you,” Wyatt says.

“Oh, I couldn’t—”

“You want your Indiana Jones moment, don’t you?” he asks, grinning. He puts his hand on her waist. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He asks Alberto to monitor the stakes where the ladder is secured, and then turns to me. “Dawn, you’ll go down first with the torch,” he instructs. “And to prove to Anya that it’ll hold.”

I read that statement so many ways: I am the sacrificial lamb. I am to do what I’m told. I’m heavier than rail-thin Anya, so if the ladder can bear my weight it will certainly bear hers. I jam on my headlamp and set my foot on the first rung and suddenly realize whose boots I am wearing.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I scramble down the ladder into the hot throat of the tomb and turn on the lamp, shining it up so that Anya can delicately pick her way down the shaft. I am convinced she digs her heel into the rock wall intentionally, so that I will suffer a rain of debris. But I stand my ground, watching her come closer.

By the time Wyatt has crawled down, I’ve backed myself into the tomb chamber. There’s not much to see here, now that it has all been excavated. Wyatt begins to describe to Anya what it looked like when he first pulled away the limestone blocks that covered the entrance. For a moment, I forget where we are, and let Wyatt’s story settle over me. I fill in the details that he leaves out: the moment when I was pressed up against him, peering over his shoulder. The way he swung me around in the tomb chapel when he realized that there was a Book of Two Ways inside the coffin. I tuck these details away, savoring them.

“Here,” Wyatt says to Anya. “Give me your phone.”

Since Alberto is still above us, extra assurance that the ladder won’t mysteriously unwind itself from its posts and leave us buried underground, Wyatt offers to play photographer. He waits for Anya to pose and smile, and then takes a few photos. She grabs the phone from him and scrolls through. “Do it over. The light’s not right.”

She looks directly at me as she says it.

Wyatt turns to me and clears his throat. I shine my headlamp directly in her eyes. “Oh,” I say, unapologetically. “Sorry.”

He eventually takes a photo of which she approves. “Now one of us both,” she insists. She hands me the phone.

Wyatt stands next to Anya, near the shelf where the canopic jars had originally been set. His arm is around her. At the last minute, just as I take the picture, she turns and presses her lips to his cheek.

I give back her phone, hoping I’ve accidentally lopped off their heads in the photo.

“So how many tombs are in this necropolis?” Anya asks.

“There were thirty-nine,” Wyatt says. “This is the fortieth.”

“Do they all look the same?”

“Pretty much. Some have more than one burial chamber, for a wife and husband.”

“How cozy.” Anya touches the wall of the burial chamber. “I wonder how many slaves it took to build a necropolis. At least as many as built the pyramids, I’m sure.”

“Shockingly, it was the exact same number of slaves,” I say. “Zero.” I fold my arms. “I’m sure your grandfather told you this, but the pyramids were built by workers who were paid a wage, or who were paying off their taxes. There is absolutely no evidence of foreign captives working on the pyramids. Also, the pyramids were feats of engineering and detail, like how the corners line up to point to the Benben stone that was the focus of solar worship in Heliopolis. For that level of skill, you wanted an expert. I mean, isn’t that why you picked Wyatt?”

“Dawn—” he murmurs, a warning.

“Oh. Sorry. I mean Dr. Armstrong.” I turn to Wyatt. “Hold your own damn flashlight.” I thrust my headlamp into his hands and climb up the rope ladder, running out of the tomb before anyone can watch me fall apart.

* * *

—

I RACE SO fast into the wadi that the wind screams in my ears, and I cannot hear Wyatt calling my name until he catches up to me. He is stronger and faster than I am; I can’t outdistance him—and even if I could, where would I go? So when he grasps my arm, I stop. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.

“I thought you knew.” He lets go, falling back a step. “You knew her name.”

“I thought she was a he.”

“Why does it matter?” Wyatt counters. “You’re married.”

“I know that,” I snap.

“Then you also know I don’t owe you an explanation about what I’ve been doing for the past fifteen bloody years,” he yells.

I want to hit him. I want to embrace him. “But you let me think that—” I swallow the rest of my sentence, kicking the sand at my feet.

Wyatt’s fingers curl under my chin, lifting my face so that he can see my expression. “Think what?” he says, so gently it breaks me.

“Think that I meant something to you.”

“You did,” Wyatt replies. “You do, Olive.”

His mouth crashes down on mine, and even as I grab his arms hard enough to hurt, I am pulling him closer. His hands spear into my hair, knocking off my hat, loosening my braid. The wind whirls in a frenzy, like we have manifested the weather.

When we draw away from each other, breathless and charged, Wyatt touches his forehead against mine. “You vanished,” he says, raw. “When you didn’t write me back, I tried to find you. But it was like you had dropped off the face of the earth.”