“Man.”
“What?”
“That’s the answer,” Alberto says.
“But I haven’t even asked it yet…”
He shrugs. “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?Spoiler alert: Oedipus figured it out.”
“No, I have a different one,” I tell him. “Why is the tail of a Sphinx always on the right side?”
Alberto laughs. “You actuallydohave a Sphinx riddle.”
“Because it matches the hieroglyph,” I answer, and then my throat closes tight. “Wyatt taught me that.”
“Fuck,” Alberto says. “You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“What difference does it make? You already hate me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
I take a long drink. “Really. Since the first day I got here, you’ve been standoffish.”
“Of course I was.” He rolls his eyes. “You showed up here and it was like steak on a hot plate.”
“Thanks?”
“The minute I saw the way he looked at you, I realized our funding was screwed. He knew better. We have been working for five years on this tomb. To jeopardize that, especially during the season when we were going to actually finally excavate…” He doesn’t finish; he doesn’t have to.
“Does he love her?” I ask.
Alberto looks at me for a long moment, and then holds out his mug. I pour another splash of cognac into it. “I don’t know. I think he loves thethoughtof her.”
I consider what Wyatt told me earlier, about wanting to make this discovery so that wherever I was in the world, I would see it. I think about Anya’s long legs and her creamy skin and concede that if Wyatt sacrificed himself on the altar of Egyptology, it couldn’t have been all that much of a hardship.
“Did you come here to find him?” Alberto asks.
I can feel the heat of his eyes on my face, waiting. His own livelihood may hang on my response. And it’s a good question—one I would never have truly let myself weigh if I wasn’t three-quarters of the way through a bottle of excellent brandy.
“I came here to findme,” I say softly. “I just don’t know if I like what I discovered.”
What has my endgame been? To see Wyatt, yes. But then what? Was I planning to speak my truth and then walk away, as if my words wouldn’t cause a ripple in the pond of his life? “I have to go home,” I realize. “To my daughter, and my husband.”
Alberto doesn’t even flinch; I realize Wyatt has shared the fact that I’m married. “So you came here to hurt Wyatt?”
“No,” I say immediately. “Why would you think that?”
“Because why else would you remind him he loves you, and then leave him. Again.”
I haven’t thought of it that way, but it is exactly what I will be doing. “I thought you were mad at him, not me,” I mutter.
“I think I’ll be mad at you both, now.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes, drinking. Then Alberto glances up. “You know that the Greeks used to believe that people were made up of two heads and two bodies. But Zeus was afraid of how powerful that could be, so he split people in two. That way, instead of causing trouble for him, they spent the rest of their lives trying to find their other half.”
“A soul mate,” I say.
“Do you believe that there’s only one for each of us, and that we have to sift through seven billion people to find it?”
