“So you dumped him and rebounded with Dad?”

I wince. “I guess I deserve that, too. But it wasn’t a rebound. My life had fallen apart, and Br— your dad helped me put it back together. How couldn’t I have fallen for him?” I take a deep breath. “I’m not expecting you to forgive me. I’m not expecting you to even understand. But what I had with Wyatt—I buried it deep on purpose, because I needed to move forward, not backward. I wanted a life with your dad. I wanted our family. When I looked back at Egypt, all I had were questions, because I didn’t have the luxury of being a scholar anymore. I had to be a sister and a mother. When I looked forward, where your dad was waiting, I saw answers.” I clear my throat. “But the feelings I had for Wyatt, somehow, they got dislodged. And took root. And grew. I could cut them down, Meret. But if I did, I’d always be looking at the spot where they bloomed.”

In a very small, cramped voice, Meret asks, “What about me?”

“What about you.” A smile heats the words. “He wants to meet you.”

Her head snaps up. “Now? Here?” I watch as it all crystallizes for her. “He’s the one who was with you at the hospital.”

“He brought me back to you,” I correct. “He’s at a hotel. It’s up to you, whether or not you want to meet him.”

She pulls at her clothes, billowing her shirt away from her curves, the way I’ve seen her do a thousand times when she’s nervous.

“You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to make him part of your life.”

She looks at me curiously, as if she’s just seeing a piece of me she never noticed before—a crooked finger with a story behind it of how it was broken; a tattoo that was previously hidden under layers of clothes. “So what happens to us? To me and you and Dad?”

“I don’t know.”

Her eyes flash. “God, can’t you ever stop lying?”

“I’m not lying.”

“Oh, okay. So he’s here to say Hi, daughter, nice to meet you, and then he’s going to leave and go back to Egypt and you’re going to stay here and we all pretend nothing’s changed?”

I don’t know how to respond, because there’s no good answer.

“Yeah,” Meret mutters. “I thought so.”

There’s a moment when, as an adult, you realize that the child you are speaking to is no longer a child. With Kieran, it happened when I had to tell him that our mother was dead. I remember looking into his eyes and seeing a shift in him, a realization that the solid foundation he’d been leaning against had turned to dust and he was falling. For Meret, it’s now. When she was a little girl, I’d told her all the fairy tales about love: how it could wake you from death, how it could triumph over evil, how it could make the poor rich. But today, I am drawing back the curtain, revealing not just pretty stories but facts: that love can also kill you; that for you to triumph, other people have to be hurt; that the wealth love brings comes at a staggering cost. “I don’t know what will happen with your dad. We have a lot to work out. But I’m also not going to tell you that I don’t want to be with Wyatt. I love him in a way that I never thought I’d love someone.”

Truth vibrates when it’s drawn across the bow of pain; Meret hears that note, and listens intently. “Some people never get to feel that way, much less find someone else they love…and I did love your dad. I do. But the greatest love I’ve ever known is you.” I reach for her hand, and she doesn’t pull away. “I lost Wyatt once, and I survived. I may lose your dad, and I will survive. But you?” In her face, I see my eyes, Wyatt’s jaw, strength from us both. “I wouldn’t survive losing you.”

With a sob, Meret throws herself against me again. I hold her close and stroke her hair, the way I used to when she was tiny and monsters took up residence in her room. They may not have been real, but her fear was, and that was all that mattered. “What if he doesn’t like me?” she asks, and I realize she has made a decision.

I frame her face in my palms. “Baby,” I say. “How couldn’t he?”

* * *

—

I TEXT WYATT. But it doesn’t feel fair to ask him into the house, not with Brian there. So instead, Wyatt parks at the curb and waits on the front porch, sitting on a little wooden swing we bought five years ago that we thought we would use more than we ever did. When I open the door, Meret a step behind me, he stands.

And lights up like a candle.

“Hello,” Wyatt says.

She shifts from one foot to the other. “Hi.”

“Would you, um. Would you care to sit down?”

She doesn’t move, so I put my hand on the small of her back and give her a little push. They sit down together on the swing, boxers in opposite corners, sizing each other up.

“Well,” I start. “I’ll just give you two a minute—”

“No,” Meret interrupts, just as Wyatt says, “Please, stay.”

So I lean against the sturdy bones of the house, trying to blend into the shingles.

Wyatt clasps his hands between his knees. Meret folds her arms.

“I hear you’re a scientist.”

“You don’t have to patronize me,” she replies.

“I wasn’t. I just…” He rubs the back of his neck. It is the first time I have ever seen Wyatt in a situation where he isn’t effortlessly comfortable. “Your mother told me a little bit about the camp you went to this summer.”

“I can catch you up on the rest. I’ve always wanted a Bernese mountain dog, I know every word of Hamilton by heart, and I’m terrified to eat fish with bones in it. I can’t cook but I can make nutrient agar. Oh,” she says, too sweetly. “And I’m a Taurus.”

He bursts out laughing. “Well. I can certainly see the resemblance.”

“There’s a DNA test for that, if you want proof.”

To Wyatt’s credit, he doesn’t look to me for help. “I don’t need to see the results.” He keeps his gaze solely on Meret, who isn’t giving an inch. “Look, you should know that…I’m glad. I don’t know how, but I’d like to try to be your father.”

I flinch, because I know that’s exactly what Meret did not want to hear.

“Thanks, but I have one of those,” she says. “You’re just genetic material.”

“Dashing and preternaturally brilliant genetic material, I hope,” he jokes.

“I wouldn’t know,” Meret replies. “We don’t seem to have a lot in common.”

“But that’s where you’re wrong.” He looks up and grins. “We both love your mother.”

Meret’s lips are pressed tightly together.

“And,” Wyatt adds, “I, too, know all the words to Hamilton.”

Meret’s eyes widen. “You do?”

“No. But I can stumble admirably through the first song.” He sobers. “I know you didn’t ask for any of this. I know it must feel like the carpet’s been ripped out from beneath you. Something else I believe we have in common. I also know it would be demeaning to you for me to assume that I could enter your life and be treated as anyone more important to you than a stranger on the street. I have no misconceptions that you think of me as a friend. But I’d like to hope that you’d give me the chance to become one.”

He fumbles in his pocket for his phone. “Oh, and there’s this,” he says.

He scrolls to a photo that has the chromatic richness of old Kodak prints. In it is a boy, with Wyatt’s telltale golden hair and wry smile, sitting beside a Bernese mountain dog on the steps of a stone building.

He means to show her a childhood pet, but both Meret and I are staring at the image of a young Wyatt—a boy who was chubby, husky, with round cheeks and the hint of a double chin.

“I don’t know if a passion for dog breeds is genetic, but—”

“You don’t look like that now,” Meret says, taking the phone from his hand.

He glances at the photo. “No.” Wyatt shrugs. “I suppose not. I was always big for my age, or at least that’s what they called it back then, to be polite. When it became clear that I couldn’t play rugby for shite I had to find a way to hide from the coach. He never went to the library on the school campus—I’m pretty sure he never read a book in his life. But I did. About pyramids and mummies and pharaonic dynasties.”

I stare at him. For all that I always imagined Wyatt to be perfect, there was a time when he felt he wasn’t.

I watch Meret touch her finger to the picture, enlarging it, as if she has to see it better to believe it. She sucks in her breath, and I can see all the answers falling into place: finally. This is where I came from.

“People change,” Wyatt says quietly. He looks at me, still speaking to Meret. “You may not think so right now, but sometimes it’s good to remember who you used to be.”

I feel my eyes sting. With one photograph, Wyatt has not only given Meret a sense of history, he’s also absolved me.

Meret hands him back his phone. “I loved that dog,” Wyatt muses. “I wanted to name him Narmer, after the first king to unify Egypt. But he was my brother’s pet, technically. So his name was Bailey.” His mouth twists. “How pedestrian.”

“Do you ever listen to podcasts?” Meret asks. An olive branch.