I do not know how to put this into words. Possibly because I love Brian enough to protect him. If you don’t tell a man that you came to him with a missing piece, he will never know to look for it.
But there is another reason: because if I kept Wyatt to myself, he was mine and mine alone. To tell Brian about him would be to give him up.
I touch his cheek with my palm, feeling the stubble of his jaw. He didn’t have time to shave this morning, before Anya arrived. I know he’s thinking about that, too, because he says, “I’ll tell her everything, if you want me to.”
“You’ll lose your funding,” I reply.
“I’ll find more.”
I feel my eyes sting. “I can’t let you do that.”
Because,it remains unsaid,I still belong to someone else.
Wyatt takes my hand from his cheek and kisses the palm. “We were destined for each other,” he says ruefully. “Two people who live in the past.”
I throw my arms around him for just one more moment. He smells like cedar, like summer. He always has. The button of his shirt presses against my temple and I push a little harder, wishing it would leave a mark.
We head back to the necropolis. I wonder what he will tell Anya; if she will be smart enough not to ask why he ran after me.
At first, as we walk, we hold hands. But as we leave the privacy of thewadi,we let go.
Alberto and Anya are waiting for us outside Djehutynakht’s tomb. Wyatt immediately bounds up the stone steps and says, “Seen enough?”
“And then some,” she replies.
We both freeze, but Wyatt recovers faster than I do. He leans down and whispers something that makes her laugh and turn in to his arms. The sun catches the diamond in her engagement ring, making light dance on the limestone pillars behind them.
Over Anya’s shoulder, his eyes are locked on me.
—
ANYA ASKS FORdinner to be served in Wyatt’s bedroom, which is all I need to lose my appetite. I work in the magazine, carefully copying images onto my iPad, until I cannot see clearly. Then I go to my own room, but it is so stifling that I feel caged.
I find myself wandering to a closet that has a padlock on it, in which Wyatt keeps a crate of very good, very expensive French brandy. Harbi and his family do not drink; the lock is for the rest of the team. I decide that Wyatt owes me this, at the very least.
I haven’t picked a lock since I was a grad student and we were opening this same closet to steal some of Dumphries’s liquor, but it comes back quickly. I use two paper clips, making one a tension bar and the other a pick. The cylinder turns, the lock pops open. There is a case of Tesseron cognac, and on top of it, a padded box that contains a crystal bottle of Louis XIII de Rémy Martin. Taped on it is a note from Richard Levin, former president of Yale, congratulating Wyatt on his appointment as the director of graduate Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
I takethatbottle.
The Dig House is quiet, too quiet. I find myself straining to hear a woman’s laughter, or Wyatt’s voice. I imagine him lying in bed with Anya and wonder if he changed the sheets. I wonder if he is thinking of me and then wonder why I am allowed to even ask that question when I spent years lying in bed with Brian.
I don’t want to go back to my room, so I wander into the communal work space, where laptops and iPads are plugged in and charging.
I sit down in Alberto’s chair, open the cognac, and drink straight from the bottle.
Alberto’s computer screen saver is the Sphinx. It’s probably a photo he took: human head and lion body, tail on the right side, the Dream Stele between its paws. I’ve read that Dream Stele—every Egyptology student has. It states that Thutmose IV, the father of Amenhotep III and grandfather of Akhenaton, was riding his chariot around the Giza necropolis and he fell asleep in the shadow of the head of the buried Sphinx. The Sphinx came to him in a dream, and said that if Thutmose IV removed the sand that covered him, he’d become king. And he did.
I don’t know how long I sit swilling cognac before Alberto comes in, but he is fuzzy around the edges.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“I would think,” I say, lifting the bottle, “that’s obvious.”
“You’re sitting at my desk.”
“This is true.” I don’t make any attempt to move.
He sighs and pulls up another rolling chair. He reaches for a coffee mug and holds it out; I pour some cognac in it. We clink, ceramic to crystal. “I have a Sphinx riddle for you,” I say.
