The woman is pretty. Taller than Win but less willowy; she has strong shoulders and sound hips and curves. As I watch, a teenage boy skids in, grabs a chicken leg off the plate, and starts eating it. I see her scold him, but he just grins and sits down at the table. A girl follows him, a few years younger, typing on her phone as she slumps down at her seat.

“Can I help you?”

I whirl around to find myself staring at Thane Bernard. He is lanky and lean, wearing the bright spandex of an avid cyclist. He carries a helmet in one hand, and smooths the other over his sweating, bald head. He has a slight accent, the h in help rising like a helium balloon. I try to take a mental snapshot, so that I can tell Win, and then I remember that she may no longer be alive.

For the first time I wonder if it is fair for Win to make dissatisfaction contagious. I had been thinking so much about allowing her to come full circle that I didn’t realize I might be breaking the smooth track of someone else’s life.

“I…I think I have the wrong address,” I sputter, and I push past him back through the gate. I walk without turning around, my heart racing.

Four blocks away, I stop rushing. I sit on the curb and draw deep drafts of air into my lungs. The stars squint, shaming me.

I can’t do it.

I can’t break up two families in less than twenty-four hours.

I walk past the Victorian gate again, hidden in the folds of the darkness. Thane Bernard and his family are deep in a conversation I cannot hear, amidst the ruins of a picked-over chicken and a scraped plate of mashed potatoes.

This story, anyway, is not mine to finish.

* * *

—

I DON’T BOTHER to get a hotel. I take a bus back to Heathrow and stand in front of the giant boards of the British Airways international departures area, trying to figure out where to check in for Boston. I inch forward with my passport in hand, until I am the next in line. The woman in front of me is wearing the sort of sleek white suit I always wish I traveled in, instead of a T-shirt and cargo pants. “Where are you heading today, madam?” the desk agent asks, in her plummy British accent.

“Cairo,” she answers.

The agent scans her passport, types into the computer terminal, checks her two matching pieces of luggage. Then she hands the woman a pass. “That flight’s boarding in thirty minutes.”

The woman moves into the throng headed through security.

“Next?” the gate agent calls, and I step forward. I hand her my passport, and she enters my name on her keyboard. “Ms. Edelstein. You’re going to Boston?”

My fingers tighten on the strap of my backpack. “Is it possible to change my ticket?”

* * *

—

MY MOTHER, WHO lived and died by superstitions, used to make us say together before we went on a trip: We’re not going anywhere. It was meant to trick the Devil. I can’t say I believe in that kind of thing, but then again, I didn’t say it before I left home, and look at where that got me.

Walking outside of the airport in Cairo in August feels like stepping onto the surface of the sun. Even late at night, the heat is a knife on your skin and comes in pressing waves. I can already feel a line of sweat running down my spine; I didn’t come prepared for this. I find myself in the middle of other people’s transitions: a rumpled, dazed group of tourists being herded into their minivan; a teen dragging duct-taped luggage from the back of an open cart to the curb; a woman securing her head scarf as it blows in the breeze.

Suddenly I am surrounded by men. “Taxi?” they bark. “You need taxi?”

There’s no hiding the fact that I’m a Westerner; it’s clear from my red hair to my cargo pants and sneakers. I nod, making eye contact with one of them, a driver with a thick mustache and a long-sleeved striped shirt. The other taxi drivers fall back, seagulls in search of another crumb.

“You have suitcase?”

I shake my head. Everything I have is in the small bag I carry over my shoulder.

“American?” the man replies, and I nod. A wide, white grin splits his face. “Welcome to Alaska!”

* * *

—

PLANES AND TRAINS and taxis. It takes me a few hours to get to Middle Egypt. As the driver turns south, bringing me back to Deir el-Bersha, I glance out the window again, struck by the beauty of the sky yawning over the desert. It’s blue and pink and orange, the stripes of a day that’s only beginning. A star winks at me for a moment before it’s swallowed by the sun.

Sothis. Sirius. The star that heralds the inundation festival at the beginning of Akhet, the season of lush crops and rebirth. In ancient times, it would have happened in July. But after so many years of the earth shifting slowly on its axis, the star now rises one morning in early August.

Today, in fact. And it would have looked exactly the same thousands of years ago when the Nile flooded and Ancient Egyptians gathered and celebrated, and one left behind a dipinto painted onto a protected rock face that, thousands of years later, was found by two graduate students.

I stare at the spot where the star has already vanished, a freckle in the rosy cheek of the horizon.

Just like the Ancient Egyptians, I see it as a sign.

MY CALENDAR IS full of dead people.

When my phone alarm chimes, I fish it out from the pocket of my cargo pants. I’ve forgotten, with the time change, to turn off the reminder. I’m still groggy with sleep, but I open the date and read the names: Iris Vale. Eun Ae Kim. Alan Rosenfeldt. Marlon Jensen.

I close my eyes, and do what I do every day at this moment: I remember them.

At one point, they were my clients. Now, they’re my stories to keep.

I wonder if Win is gone by now. I wonder where I will type her name into my calendar.

Everyone in my row is asleep. I slip my phone back into my pocket and carefully crawl over the woman to my right without disturbing her—air traveler’s yoga—to make my way to the bathroom in the rear of the plane. There I blow my nose and look in the mirror. I grab a handful of tissues and open the door, intent on heading back to my seat, but the little galley area is packed with flight attendants. “Ma’am,” one of them says, “could you please take your seat?”

I climb back over the dozing woman and buckle my seatbelt. A hand slips over mine, threading our fingers together. I lean against Wyatt’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of him, touching him just because I can. In spite of all that has happened in the past six weeks—from the days spent trying to repair the sieve of my marriage, to Win’s letter and the trip I made to London; from my last-minute decision to go to Egypt, to reuniting with Wyatt and unearthing the coffin—getting to this point feels both monumental and inevitable.

Wyatt blinks awake and smiles slowly. “Where’d you go?” he asks, his voice still rough with sleep, just as the overhead lights blaze and the cabin comes alive.

* * *

—

I HAD THE second hardest conversation of my life in a tomb in Amarna. After I told Wyatt that Meret was his daughter, he just stared at me, as if he had clearly heard the words wrong. And yet, what had I expected? Learning this after fifteen years? When his first assumption—like Brian’s—was that I had hid this from him?

They had, I realized, this one thing in common.

I filled the stunned silence. I told him about my mother’s stay in hospice. About feeling so overwhelmed and how Brian suddenly appeared. I told him that I slept with Brian because I couldn’t remember what joy felt like, because for one night I needed to be the one taken care of, instead of the caretaker. I told him about the pregnancy. I told him how, a year later, we got married.

I also told him about Gita, and the night of Meret’s birthday, when Brian didn’t come home to celebrate with us. I told him how I had driven away and thought I was leaving for good, but didn’t. I told him about Win and her lost love and how I searched for Thane Bernard and found Wyatt. I told him about the moment Meret came into my bedroom with a DNA test; how all the tumblers clicked into place.

I told him how, at the last minute, I changed my return flight to come to Cairo instead to Boston—because he deserved to know about Meret, now that I did.

When I finished, my shirt was sticking to my back with sweat. There was no air in that tomb. I felt frozen inside, an insect in amber. Finally, Wyatt raised his head. His expression was careful, guarded. “You found out you were pregnant, and it never crossed your mind that it could be mine?”

I didn’t know how to explain to Wyatt the weeks that my mother was dying, the strange elasticity where hours bled into days and nothing felt linear. I didn’t know how to explain how I’d felt torn apart from leaving him, and embarrassed because I’d used Brian to stitch myself back together. That I’d been drowning in a future that was uncertain, and grabbed on to someone solid and strong. That when I got pregnant, I truly thought it was Brian’s baby, Fate pointing a giant neon arrow in one direction.

So I said nothing.

A muscle jumped in Wyatt’s jaw. “Was I that easy to forget?” he asked. “Or were you just selfish as hell?” He brushed past me then, his footsteps echoing as he moved through other chambers of the tomb.