Dawn McDowell had. She became Mrs. Brian Edelstein.

“Do you know why I was so determined to find Djehutynakht’s tomb?”

“Yes,” I say, and he laughs.

“Okay, fair point. But also because I thought if the discovery was big enough, you’d hear about it.”

“And do what?”

“I don’t know.” He meets my gaze. “Did you tell him about me?”

I shake my head.

“Why not?”

I do not know how to put this into words. Possibly because I love Brian enough to protect him. If you don’t tell a man that you came to him with a missing piece, he will never know to look for it.

But there is another reason: because if I kept Wyatt to myself, he was mine and mine alone. To tell Brian about him would be to give him up.

I touch his cheek with my palm, feeling the stubble of his jaw. He didn’t have time to shave this morning, before Anya arrived. I know he’s thinking about that, too, because he says, “I’ll tell her everything, if you want me to.”

“You’ll lose your funding,” I reply.

“I’ll find more.”

I feel my eyes sting. “I can’t let you do that.”

Because, it remains unsaid, I still belong to someone else.

Wyatt takes my hand from his cheek and kisses the palm. “We were destined for each other,” he says ruefully. “Two people who live in the past.”

I throw my arms around him for just one more moment. He smells like cedar, like summer. He always has. The button of his shirt presses against my temple and I push a little harder, wishing it would leave a mark.

We head back to the necropolis. I wonder what he will tell Anya; if she will be smart enough not to ask why he ran after me.

At first, as we walk, we hold hands. But as we leave the privacy of the wadi, we let go.

Alberto and Anya are waiting for us outside Djehutynakht’s tomb. Wyatt immediately bounds up the stone steps and says, “Seen enough?”

“And then some,” she replies.

We both freeze, but Wyatt recovers faster than I do. He leans down and whispers something that makes her laugh and turn in to his arms. The sun catches the diamond in her engagement ring, making light dance on the limestone pillars behind them.

Over Anya’s shoulder, his eyes are locked on me.

* * *

—

ANYA ASKS FOR dinner to be served in Wyatt’s bedroom, which is all I need to lose my appetite. I work in the magazine, carefully copying images onto my iPad, until I cannot see clearly. Then I go to my own room, but it is so stifling that I feel caged.

I find myself wandering to a closet that has a padlock on it, in which Wyatt keeps a crate of very good, very expensive French brandy. Harbi and his family do not drink; the lock is for the rest of the team. I decide that Wyatt owes me this, at the very least.

I haven’t picked a lock since I was a grad student and we were opening this same closet to steal some of Dumphries’s liquor, but it comes back quickly. I use two paper clips, making one a tension bar and the other a pick. The cylinder turns, the lock pops open. There is a case of Tesseron cognac, and on top of it, a padded box that contains a crystal bottle of Louis XIII de Rémy Martin. Taped on it is a note from Richard Levin, former president of Yale, congratulating Wyatt on his appointment as the director of graduate Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

I take that bottle.

The Dig House is quiet, too quiet. I find myself straining to hear a woman’s laughter, or Wyatt’s voice. I imagine him lying in bed with Anya and wonder if he changed the sheets. I wonder if he is thinking of me and then wonder why I am allowed to even ask that question when I spent years lying in bed with Brian.

I don’t want to go back to my room, so I wander into the communal work space, where laptops and iPads are plugged in and charging.

I sit down in Alberto’s chair, open the cognac, and drink straight from the bottle.

Alberto’s computer screen saver is the Sphinx. It’s probably a photo he took: human head and lion body, tail on the right side, the Dream Stele between its paws. I’ve read that Dream Stele—every Egyptology student has. It states that Thutmose IV, the father of Amenhotep III and grandfather of Akhenaton, was riding his chariot around the Giza necropolis and he fell asleep in the shadow of the head of the buried Sphinx. The Sphinx came to him in a dream, and said that if Thutmose IV removed the sand that covered him, he’d become king. And he did.

I don’t know how long I sit swilling cognac before Alberto comes in, but he is fuzzy around the edges.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“I would think,” I say, lifting the bottle, “that’s obvious.”

“You’re sitting at my desk.”

“This is true.” I don’t make any attempt to move.

He sighs and pulls up another rolling chair. He reaches for a coffee mug and holds it out; I pour some cognac in it. We clink, ceramic to crystal. “I have a Sphinx riddle for you,” I say.

“Man.”

“What?”

“That’s the answer,” Alberto says.

“But I haven’t even asked it yet…”

He shrugs. “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening? Spoiler alert: Oedipus figured it out.”

“No, I have a different one,” I tell him. “Why is the tail of a Sphinx always on the right side?”

Alberto laughs. “You actually do have a Sphinx riddle.”

“Because it matches the hieroglyph,” I answer, and then my throat closes tight. “Wyatt taught me that.”

“Fuck,” Alberto says. “You’re not going to cry, are you?”

“What difference does it make? You already hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

I take a long drink. “Really. Since the first day I got here, you’ve been standoffish.”

“Of course I was.” He rolls his eyes. “You showed up here and it was like steak on a hot plate.”

“Thanks?”

“The minute I saw the way he looked at you, I realized our funding was screwed. He knew better. We have been working for five years on this tomb. To jeopardize that, especially during the season when we were going to actually finally excavate…” He doesn’t finish; he doesn’t have to.

“Does he love her?” I ask.

Alberto looks at me for a long moment, and then holds out his mug. I pour another splash of cognac into it. “I don’t know. I think he loves the thought of her.”

I consider what Wyatt told me earlier, about wanting to make this discovery so that wherever I was in the world, I would see it. I think about Anya’s long legs and her creamy skin and concede that if Wyatt sacrificed himself on the altar of Egyptology, it couldn’t have been all that much of a hardship.

“Did you come here to find him?” Alberto asks.

I can feel the heat of his eyes on my face, waiting. His own livelihood may hang on my response. And it’s a good question—one I would never have truly let myself weigh if I wasn’t three-quarters of the way through a bottle of excellent brandy.

“I came here to find me,” I say softly. “I just don’t know if I like what I discovered.”

What has my endgame been? To see Wyatt, yes. But then what? Was I planning to speak my truth and then walk away, as if my words wouldn’t cause a ripple in the pond of his life? “I have to go home,” I realize. “To my daughter, and my husband.”

Alberto doesn’t even flinch; I realize Wyatt has shared the fact that I’m married. “So you came here to hurt Wyatt?”

“No,” I say immediately. “Why would you think that?”

“Because why else would you remind him he loves you, and then leave him. Again.”

I haven’t thought of it that way, but it is exactly what I will be doing. “I thought you were mad at him, not me,” I mutter.

“I think I’ll be mad at you both, now.”

We sit in silence for a few minutes, drinking. Then Alberto glances up. “You know that the Greeks used to believe that people were made up of two heads and two bodies. But Zeus was afraid of how powerful that could be, so he split people in two. That way, instead of causing trouble for him, they spent the rest of their lives trying to find their other half.”

“A soul mate,” I say.

“Do you believe that there’s only one for each of us, and that we have to sift through seven billion people to find it?”

“No. I think that you can love more than one person in a lifetime. There’s the one who teaches you what love is, even if it doesn’t last.” Wyatt. “And then there’s the one who makes you a better human than you were, even as you do the same for him.” Brian.

“And then there’s the last one,” Alberto adds. “The one that you never get enough time with. But who sees you through to the end.”