“Exactly. Because I almost died. But I didn’t.” I take a step forward. “We have to talk, Brian, as if I wasn’t in a plane crash.”

“If you hadn’t run away you wouldn’t have been in a plane crash,” Brian blurts out. He falls back, as if the force of his anger has shoved him.

His voice is hot and low, a match touching tinder. You asked for this, I remind myself. Before the entire house goes up in flames, I reach for his arm, intending to pull him into the backyard for privacy. But the moment I touch him, he jerks like he’s been burned.

Which, I suppose, he has.

“Let’s not do this where Meret can hear us.”

“Oh,” he says. “So now you’re thinking about her?”

My pulse is so loud in my ears that I am sure he can hear it. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I am so sorry, Brian.”

“For what?” he asks, his voice deceptively soft. “For lying to me? For leaving us after that bomb dropped? Making me pick up the pieces for Meret?” His eyes narrow. “For fucking him?”

I flinch. A memory circles the drain of my mind: me, asking Win if she felt she was cheating on Felix. Win’s response: There are times I wonder if my whole marriage has been me cheating on Thane.

“You left your child behind,” Brian accuses. “You abandoned her, when she’d just found out…” He shakes his head, unable to even mention the DNA test. “Do you know how much she’s cried these past three weeks, thinking she lost a father and a mother? Do you have any idea how selfish that was?”

Later, when I replay this, I will realize it was that last adjective that broke a bridge of clay in me, a structure that had remained standing far longer than it ever should have. “Selfish,” I repeat. “Selfish? Do you know how many people I’ve put in front of myself for the past fifteen years? My mother. My brother. My clients. Meret. You. Even Wyatt. Everyone else’s welfare was more important than mine. I am always the last person I think about. So just for a minute—one minute—I did. I know I didn’t do this the right way, if that even exists. I know I should have told you what I was thinking, where I was going. But I had to go, for my own peace of mind. I couldn’t stay here and pretend everything was fine, like usual, and let this eat away at me, wondering what if. Eventually, there would have been nothing left of me.”

When I finish, I am breathing fast, like I’ve run a marathon to reach this conversation.

Maybe I have.

I realize that this white-hot anger is the most undiluted emotion Brian and I have had between us in a long time. I think he realizes it, too. This time, when our eyes meet, the storm between us is gone. It’s just him and me, like it used to be, standing in puddles of regret. “Why wasn’t it enough?” he asks softly. “Why weren’t we enough?”

“I wanted it to be enough. I went to Cairo because I needed to know if this was all in my imagination. You know. If I’d taken a memory and blown it out of proportion.”

“If you felt disconnected, we could have fixed that. Instead you tried to latch on to something new.”

Something old, I correct silently.

“I thought we were a team,” Brian says. “We made it through the deaths of people we loved. We built careers. We were raising a teenager. I thought I leaned on you and you leaned on me and even if it was lopsided sometimes, it always evened out.”

“I thought that, too,” I confess.

“Then…why?”

I do not have an answer for him—why we are drawn to certain people, why some soothe our angles and edges better than others.

Brian closes his eyes. “I keep thinking: I did this to you.”

I realize when he says this that I have not thought about Gita for a long, long time. I wonder if he turned to her, after he came home from the North Carolina hospital. If he cried in her arms.

If I still have the right to feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach when I think about that. If I ever did.

But then I realize that’s not what he’s talking about. “Every night when you were away, I’d lie awake and hope you were miserable. You lie to me for fifteen years…you screw me over and you screw over our kid…and there’s no punishment?” He swallows. “I feel like I manifested that plane crash.”

He’s wrong. The crash wasn’t retribution, but there is a price I have to pay. No matter how happy I am with Wyatt, that joy is poisoned. It comes at the cost of someone else’s happiness.

Brian reaches out, his hand stopping just short of my shaved scalp. “I wanted you to be hurt. But not this like, Dawn,” he says. “Never like this.”

I am stunned that scientific, methodical Brian could believe, even in passing, that his dark private thoughts had anything to do with an airplane malfunction.

“There’s another universe where I got angry, and you were gone forever. So…I don’t know. Maybe it’s superstitious, but I thought if I didn’t yell anymore, you’d…stay.”

I open my mouth, close it. “I’m sorry,” I finally manage. Again.

Brian’s eyes are dark and soft. They move from my own eyes to the curved scar on my scalp to my lips. “I know,” he says. “I am, too.”

Over his shoulder, through the window, I see a flash of light on the road. I imagine it is Wyatt, driving away.

* * *

—

WHEN I OPEN the door, Meret is sitting on her bed with her laptop open. She sits up, yanking out her earbuds, freezing in place. I move gingerly, the way I would approach a wild animal, and sit down on the edge of the bed.

She throws herself at me.

I wrap my arms around her and bury my face in her hair. The reality of leaving her—leaving this—feels like a blow to the head. I’m dizzy, sick with the thought that I may never have had the chance to see who she becomes. I know I am hugging her too fiercely, that she can barely breathe, but I can’t seem to relax my arms. I think of how, when she was a baby, I would lean down and nuzzle her neck, blow a raspberry, make her laugh.

“You always smell like bubble bath,” she whispers.

“I…I do?”

“Last week I was at camp and I came out of a classroom and smelled that same soap and I started looking all over the place because I was sure you were there.” She pulls away from me. “You weren’t.”

I try to imagine her, hope rising like yeast, turning in circles and not being able to find me.

She looks at my head. “Does it hurt?”

“A little.” I touch my scalp tentatively. “Very Frankenstein-chic, right?”

“It’s not funny.” Meret wipes a tear away with the back of her hand. “You could have died.”

“Anyone can,” I say gently. “Anytime.”

“But you didn’t even say goodbye,” she blurts out, and I wonder how I haven’t seen it until this moment: the streaks of self-loathing that paint the walls, the stripes of insecurity woven into the bedding where she nests.

I decide to tell her the truth. “If I did,” I admit, “I wouldn’t have had the courage to go.”

“You mean leave,” Meret corrects bitterly. “Leave me.”

I hesitate. “I had to find someone.”

“My biological father.”

I take a deep breath. “That’s why I was in Egypt. I know that your”—I falter, trying to find the right word—“your other father told you.”

“He’s my only father,” Meret says, loyal. “I don’t even know the other person’s name.”

“I could tell you about him,” I gently offer. “Wyatt.”

She is nearly vibrating with—with what? Fear? Rage? Finally, she glances up again. Permission.

So I bring Wyatt, metaphorically, into this house. I tell her the story of the boy I hated at first sight, with his golden hair and sky eyes and swagger. I tell her about how we both jockeyed to be the best in the department at Yale. I tell her about Wyatt’s upbringing in England and his brother’s death and his title. I tell her about the Dig House and how still the desert is before the sun rises and how we were fighting before we found the dipinto. I tell her that when he kissed me, I realized the reason I’d been pushing him away was because if he came close, I wouldn’t be able to ever separate myself from him.

“I didn’t know about you,” I finish. “I didn’t know I was pregnant when I left Egypt.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Meret scowls. “All the talks about being safe and using protection. The minute I got my period I practically had to wear armor to make sure I didn’t end up like—well, like you.”

“I guess I deserve that.”