The kindest blow is the cleanest one. “I never fell out of it,” I whisper.

Brian nods, studiously avoiding my gaze. “You know, when you’re at a physics conference, physicists are always posing theoretical situations. Like, say you’re a passenger on a plane whose engines fail and you’re about to crash and die, should you take solace in the fact that there are other versions of you out there somewhere, that will live on? Or the inverse: should you feel worse knowing that there’s a version of you whose life is a disaster—a you that flunked out of school or became a criminal or got bitterly dumped and divorced. These are honestly the things quantum physicists talk about.” Finally, he looks at me. “They’re supposed to be hypothetical.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I falter, and at that, Brian smiles a little.

“Well,” he says. “You’re preaching to the choir there.”

In an ideal world, the plane wouldn’t have crashed. I wouldn’t be lying in a hospital bed with a hole in my skull. I would have had time to introduce Wyatt to Brian, and to Meret.

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have had to.

“I’m going home to Meret,” Brian says, and my jaw drops.

“What?”

He nods, scooting closer to the bed. He reaches for my hand. “There was no way I wasn’t flying here to make sure you were all right,” Brian says. “And I’ll confirm with the doctors. But the prognosis is good. Meret needs one of us. And I assume he’ll bring you to Boston when you’re discharged.”

“Yes, but—”

“Dawn. You want to be with him.”

He says this so evenly that I hold my breath, certain that there is a but.

He stands up, his green eyes crinkled at the corners, even if the smile does not reach them. “All I’ve ever hoped for is to give you what you want.”

Brian leans down and so gently, so tenderly kisses my forehead, framing my face in his hands. “You were coming back to me, when the plane crashed,” he says. “You just don’t know it yet.”

He slips out of the room without looking back.

* * *

—

WYATT REFUSES TO leave my room and charms the nurses with his accent and his dimples so that he can camp out overnight, even though he isn’t supposed to. He contacts Yale and talks at length to the dean of the faculty. The neurosurgeon comes by twice to tell me I’m doing better than expected. I nap, and when I wake, I feel like myself. We do a crossword puzzle and watch a few episodes of Law & Order: SVU. Wyatt eats the Jell-O from my tray. He tells me what I don’t remember: how there were thirty-six survivors. How we were brought to this hospital; how I became woozy watching him get stitched up and slipped out of the room to get some air; how he heard the commotion and ran out to find me on the floor, surrounded by medical personnel. “Couldn’t you have been less competitive?” he asks drily. “I was the one with the bleeding head wound, but you had to win the plane crash.”

He is joking, because it is easier than facing the truth: had I been sitting in a different seat, had I struck the ground in a different way, I would not be here. Our story, which has just begun again, would be over. Somewhere, in a parallel timeline, there is another me at my own funeral.

That makes me think about Win. Is she still alive? If I’d died, would she have been waiting for me?

This, even more than the bandage around my head, makes me realize how close I have come to death. I start to shiver and can’t stop. Wyatt crawls into bed beside me. “Hey,” he says, holding me close. “Hey, Olive. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right.” I can barely breathe; it is as if I’ve only just seen the odds of my survival and I am crushed beneath the weight of them.

“It’s going to be,” he announces, and I have never been more grateful for his arrogance.

“What if the doctor’s wrong?” I whisper. “What if I close my eyes and don’t wake up?”

Wyatt stares down at me, fierce. “You do not get to die. Period.”

I smile a little at that. “You know, if it came down to it, I think you could strike a bargain with Osiris himself.”

“If you’re afraid to close your eyes, I’ll keep you awake. If you don’t believe the doctors, I’ll find a hundred more to convince you.” He grins ruefully. “Plus, you have to stay alive if only for my own safety. If you die on my watch, your husband will kill me.”

“I didn’t want you to meet him that way,” I say.

“Hematoma aside, I don’t imagine there was any scenario where that would have been less awkward.” He hesitates. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wouldn’t have left you.”

I don’t know how to explain that the reason Brian went home was about not how little he cares for me, but how much.

I wonder, had the roles been reversed, if Wyatt would have given me the space to make a choice.

He takes my hand and places it over his heart, which beats steady and strong.

“Do you think anyone ever makes love in a hospital bed?” he muses.

I muffle a laugh. “I think if you’re in a hospital, you’re supposed to be too sick for that.”

“What do they know?” His hand slips around my waist, coming to rest. “It’s like this spot was made for me,” Wyatt says. “Like we were carved from the same block of limestone.”

I think about the statue of Ramesses II at Luxor, hewed from the same stone as his wife, Nefertari, who is depicted at a fraction of his massive image and nestled between his legs.

“Except when they build a temple for us,” Wyatt says, “your statue gets to be the same size as mine.”

“How do you always know what I’m thinking?”

He glances down at me. “Because I’ve been trying to get in your head for fifteen years, maybe.” He reaches for my hand, tangling our fingers together. “I used to have a fantasy that you wrote me and told me you weren’t happy.”

“That was your fantasy?”

“One of the tame ones. I’d dream it, and then realize it was a dream, and then throw myself even harder into my work.”

“Did you write me back?” I ask. “In the dream?”

He nods. “I told you to fix it. But in general terms. To get on a plane and travel. To stay up all night. To kiss a stranger. But I really wanted to tell you to travel to me. Stay up all night with me. Kiss me.”

So I do. I press my lips to the rough edge of his chin. “What happened to that fantasy?”

“It pales next to reality,” Wyatt says.

But reality is a plane crash, and a head injury, and a Gordian knot of relationships that is no less tangled than it was when I left Boston.

There is a literary text in Ancient Egyptian that says the gods made magic so that people could ward off misfortune. And yet, although you might be able to diminish something bad, you still couldn’t prevent it from happening.

I look at Wyatt’s hand, scarred from working in the field. I look at mine, still wearing a wedding band. “Where do we go from here?”

I am well aware that although we boarded a plane together and although Wyatt wants to meet his daughter, we haven’t really discussed our own future. We haven’t talked about Anya. In a way, I don’t mind. I’m afraid to hear what Wyatt wants.

I’m afraid to hear what I want.

“As far from this hospital as humanly possible. Hopefully sooner rather than later.”

“I meant figuratively.”

“Maybe this is presumptuous,” Wyatt says, “but I hope you’ll go wherever I go.”

“You have a fiancée.”

“You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve been too busy surviving a plane crash to actually call that off.” When I don’t laugh, he brushes a kiss across my lips. “I know we both made commitments to other people. I think we meant to love those people for the rest of our lives. But things don’t always work out the way we’ve planned. We know that better than anyone.”

“I’m scared,” I whisper.

“You’ve a hole in your head,” he murmurs, kissing my bandaged temple. “You’re badass.”

“That’s not the same,” I say. “I have so much to lose.”

“So do I…and I’ve never even met her.”

“I want her to like you.”

“How couldn’t she?” He grins, his usual cocky self. But in his eyes I can see it: that flicker of fear, that discomfort of being thrust into a role he hasn’t prepared for. For two people who are obsessed with history, we are doing a lousy job of confronting our own.

I think of Meret, of her face when she saw mine on her screen, of all the work I have to do to fix what I’ve broken. “I can’t just move overseas.”

“Then I’ll commute.”

“To Egypt?”

“To bloody Mars, if I have to.” He smiles at me, and light fills all my darkness. “Don’t you get it, Olive?” Wyatt says quietly. “That’s the easy part.”

He wraps his arm around me. Any minute now, the nurse is going to come in and yell at us. But until then, I’m not budging.

“The other fantasies,” I ask. “The less tame ones…?”

I feel Wyatt’s grin against my neck. “I had a particularly racy one about painting spells from the Book of Going Forth by Day.”

“That’s a terrible fantasy.”

“Your naked body was my papyrus.”

I laugh. “Tell me more,” I say.

* * *