There is a Middle Kingdom text called The Dispute Between a Man and His Ba, in which a man argues with his soul, saying he wants to commit suicide. The soul counters by saying that we don’t really know what happens after death, so why take that risk? The text doesn’t judge the man for wanting to kill himself—it’s not about going to hell, or sin, or even a warning. It’s about missing out on the enjoyment of life on earth.

Win stretches out her hand, and I take it. Her bones are light and insubstantial. She is an hourglass, and there is so little sand remaining. “I have one regret, you know. That I didn’t get to meet you under better circumstances.”

I feel a telltale prickle of tears in my eyes. “Win, it has been a joy getting to know you.”

“I think we would have been friends,” she says.

“I think we are friends.”

She nods. “That’s why I want you to leave.”

I look at her quizzically.

“To deliver my letter.”

I shake my head. “I promised you I would get it to Thane, but right now, you’re my priority.”

“And I’m asking you to go now, to do this. I know it won’t change anything. But I think it’s going to be easier for me to…leave…knowing that he’s thinking of me.” Win’s sentence ends in a whisper. “I trust you, Dawn.”

“But—”

“You told me you’d make sure that whatever I wanted at the end, or needed, I’d have. I need this. I want this.”

“Win,” I say clearly, carefully, “you may very well die while I’m off finding Thane.”

“I’ll have Felix, here.”

I nod, unable to speak for a moment. “I’ll make sure that my friend Abigail comes. She’s a hospice social worker.”

“That would be good,” Win says. “For Felix, too.”

I believe that there are five things we need to say to people we love before they die, and I give this advice to caregivers: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye. I tell them that they can interpret those prompts any way they like, and nothing will have been left unsaid.

I forgive Win for making me do this.

I hope she will forgive me for not being here, if she dies when I’m away.

I thank her for showing me a piece of myself I’d forgotten.

“I love you,” I tell her, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

When I meet her gaze, she is crying, too. “Goodbye,” I say.

She reaches up, which takes considerable effort, and holds on to my hand with both of her own, as if she, too, is having trouble letting go.

From a desk drawer, I take the rolled canvas, with its art on one side and my cramped handwriting on the other. Tied with a piece of string, it looks like the papyrus scroll of the Book of Going Forth by Day.

“Dawn?” Win’s voice reaches me as I am about to cross the threshold of the room. “I hope you find him.”

“Thane? I will. I promise.”

“Not mine,” she says. “Yours.”

* * *

—

WHEN BRIAN COMES home from work, I am packing, and I have purchased a ticket to Heathrow. He sees me folding a change of clothes and underwear into a knapsack and goes still in the doorway. I realize he thinks I am leaving him.

Again.

“I’m going to London,” I explain. “For Win.”

He sits on the edge of the bed. “Did she die, then?”

“No. But I don’t think it will be long now. She asked me to deliver her letter now, instead of waiting.”

Brian nods, pulling at a thread in our comforter.

“I know you don’t want me to go,” I reply. “But I made a promise.”

“A promise,” Brian repeats. “You made one to me, too, a long time ago.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Brian looks at me. “I found you looking at your old boyfriend online, but I didn’t run. You keep saying that I’m the problem, that it’s because of what I did or almost did, but I’m here. I’m sticking. I’m fighting for our marriage. You’re the one who keeps putting distance between us.” His voice breaks. “Jesus. Being with you is all I ever wanted. And being with me, for you, is torture.”

“That’s not true. I love you.” I hesitate. “I can see us, twenty years from now, with wrinkles and white hair and grandchildren, all of it. I just don’t know how we get from here…to there.”

He holds my palm between his hands, turning it over like he could divine my future. “I do. I’ll do whatever it takes to make you feel safe again. I’ll quit my job and move to a different university. I’ll go to counseling. We could take a vacation. Egypt—you could show me Egypt! Let’s go to Meret’s tennis matches together and be the loudest, most embarrassing parents. Let’s try to remember how to be us again.”

I want to. I want to so badly that I ache. But I can’t figure out how to be us if I don’t know who I am.

“It’s like déjà vu. The thing I’m most afraid of happening keeps actually happening,” Brian says. “Every time you walk out that door, I think it’s the time you’re not coming back.”

I don’t know what to say. The last time I ran away, I didn’t think I was coming back, either.

Brian draws a shallow breath. “Do you think I don’t know that you settled?”

“I didn’t settle,” I tell him. “I wound up exactly where I was supposed to wind up.”

“Then don’t go.”

Logic. Brian has always been able to wield it. He makes it seem so simple: stay here, and fight for the marriage. But I have to deliver Win’s letter.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t deliver it,” Brian adds, reading my thoughts. “I’m saying you shouldn’t deliver it right now.”

“Sometimes the past matters more than the present,” I answer, and he lets go of my hand.

We are saved from ourselves by Meret, who bounces into the bedroom, brandishing an envelope. “It’s back. It’s finally back!”

Brian and I both instantly morph into normal, untroubled parents. “Genomia?” Brian guesses.

“What’s Genomia?”

Meret sits down between us. “The DNA test Dad got me for my birthday.”

I vaguely remember her thanking Brian for the belated gift—but I hadn’t actually ever asked what the present was.

“It’s supposed to tell you if you have tendencies for, like, celiac disease or high cholesterol or Alzheimer’s…or obesity,” Meret says. “I just thought it would be cool to see why I’m the way I am.”

A girl who looks nothing like her parents, who is trying to find her place in the world. I meet Brian’s gaze over her head.

“Well?” he says. “Time for the big reveal?”

She tears open the envelope. “The first page is just ancestry,” Meret says. “But I already know I’m Irish and…”

“Ninety-eight percent?” Brian looks at the pie chart on the paper. “That’s weird. Your grandma and grandpa were Ashkenazi Jews from Poland. What’s the margin of error for the test?”

Always the scientist.

Meret smirks. “Is now the time to tell me I’m adopted?”

I stare at the pie chart and suddenly I can’t move. My blood, the same blood that runs in Meret’s veins, is sluggish. That nearly complete circle graph. British and Irish, ninety-eight percent.

The marquess is my father. I’m merely an earl.

All the way back to William the Conqueror, I’m afraid.

English, Wyatt had said. Through and through.

THERE’S AN EGYPTIAN myth in which Isis, hungry to get power from Re to give her own son, brings down the sun god by creating a poisonous snake out of his own spit. Re can’t fight it, because it’s part of him. That is how it feels when, the next day, I am working in the magazine and Wyatt comes in.

I already know that Anya is leaving. I heard the Land Rover pulling away; I assumed that Wyatt was in it with her, driving her back to Cairo to make her flight.

“I’m surprised to see you,” I say.

He leans against one of the storage shelves. “Alberto had to go to Cairo to get some computer cable, so he offered to play chauffeur.”

“He deserves a raise,” I say, turning my attention to a line of hieratic I’ve read four times.

Wyatt comes closer, climbing up the scaffolding so that he is standing opposite me, the cavern of the coffin between us. “You’re angry.”

“You said it yourself: I don’t have the right to be angry.” I look away from him. “I got your note. Or was that a parting gift?”

I want to ask him what he said to Anya. And at the same time, I don’t want to know. Either way, I can’t see where we go from here.

“Dammit, Olive. I really want to talk to you.”

“Then talk.”

“Not here.” Wyatt climbs down from the scaffolding and stands at the base of the coffin, his hand extended, like a knight rescuing a maiden from a tower. “Let’s go for a drive.”

* * *

—