“Then I’ll move. I’ll defect to Harvard.”
I shake my head. “You were not meant to sit in a classroom, Wyatt. And Harvard doesn’t own the concession in Bersha.”
He sits back. “You’re having doubts.” He speaks slowly, as if he has never heard those words in his life.
“Not about you,” I say quickly, because he needs to hear it, and so do I. “About…the logistics of home.”
Wyatt kisses me so gently it already feels like a memory. “Home isn’t a where, Olive. It’s a who.”
There’s an ancient text, the story of Sinuhe, who flees his native country. When he leaves Egypt, he says,My heart is not in my body. To the Ancient Egyptians, for whom the heart was the site of intellect and emotion and faith, it was the same as saying:I have lost my mind.
Whatever happens, whatever I gain, it is going to be tempered by loss.
My heart is not in my body,I think.
—
THAT NIGHTIdream in blue.
I imagine Win and Thane, traipsing through Paris to find the perfect pigment.
I see Meret the moment she entered the world, her skin porcelain until oxygen pinked through her like a sunrise.
I picture how Brian’s hands shook when he reached across the blue tablecloth and asked me to marry him, as if he still wasn’t sure after a year that I would come home every night to him.
And I remember Wyatt’s eyes, after the plane crash, when the hospital walls spun and I fell to the floor and couldn’t speak or move. He had leaned over me, filling my field of vision. Although there was only buzzing in my ears, I could read his lips:
Olive.
Olive.
I love.
“You,” I had gasped, my last word when I thought I was dying.
—
ONE WEEK AFTERI am back in Boston, Kieran comes over to remove my staples. Wyatt is at his hotel, taking a phone call with Mostafa, the antiquities director. Brian is at work. Meret finds me alone in the bathroom after my brother leaves, staring at my scar in the mirror. A misshapen braid of the remaining half of my hair snakes over my shoulder.
Herodotus wrote that around 499B.C.E., Histiaeus—the deposed King of Miletus—wanted help revolting against the Persians. He tattooed a note on an enslaved man’s head and sent him to a sympathizer months later, with the instruction to shave the man’s hair and read the message.
Even after there is hair on this side of my head again, I will know there’s a story hiding beneath it.
“It’ll grow out,” Meret says, looking at the shadowed stubble of the buzzed section of my head.
“Yeah,” I reply. “Eventually.”
Meret grabs my hand and pulls me out of the bathroom. She tugs me down the stairs and snags my purse off the counter before leading me outside.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“Trust me.”
In Brookline, we are only a few blocks from Coolidge Corner. Meret leads me down the main block, into a salon where I get my highlights done twice a year. My normal hairdresser, Siobhan, turns as the door jingles, takes one look at me and the scar on my head, and her jaw drops.
“Hi,” Meret announces. “I know we don’t have an appointment but my mom recently nearly died and it would be really cool if you could squeeze her in just this once.”
Every client in the salon is staring at me. The woman in Siobhan’s chair, whose wet hair is wrapped in a towel, stands up. “You can have my spot,” she says.
