Georgia’s voice softens slightly, but her position doesn’t waver. “I know you’ve been waiting for this. I know how much it means to you. But Calvin, we have to do this right. We have to give these remains the respect and care they deserve. And that takes time.”
“You want me to sit on the most significant discovery of my life for months while you… what? Make sure every pottery shard is properly catalogued?”
“Yes!” Her frustration finally breaks through. “That’s exactly what I want! Because that’s what this work requires! I’m sorry it’s not fast enough for you. I’m sorry it doesn’t fit your personal timeline. But Calvin, this is archaeology. This is what I do. And if you can’t trust me to do it right, then maybe you reallydidhire the wrong person.”
The words hang in the air between us.
Ella, still clinging to Fatima, starts to whimper. She can sense the tension, the anger, and it’s frightening her.
“Mama?” she says uncertainly.
Georgia’s expression crumbles. She reaches for Ella, and the toddler rushes right to her. “I need to get her away from this,” Georgia says, not quite meeting my eyes. “We’ll discuss this later.” Georgia looks like she wants to say something else, butElla is fussing now, pulling at her shirt, wanting to be anywhere but here.
“I’ll take her to the tent,” Georgia says quietly. “Omar, Yasmin, continue documentation. Follow standard protocols. No one touches the chamber until we’ve completed the full exterior analysis.”
She walks away, and I’m left standing at the edge of our most significant discovery, feeling hollow.
CHAPTER 20
GEORGIA
Time is a strange thing. When you stay up late talking into the night with your friends, seven hours feels like one. And a kiss from the right person, while from the outside it can look like only a minute, can make time stop altogether.
Tonight, time is twisted, curled in on itself. Minutes rush by, then hours drag. I lie in my tent with Ella curled beside me, staring at the canvas ceiling, replaying the argument over and over in my mind.
You want to share it for the wrong reasons.
That’s not a good enough reason to rush this.
If you can’t trust me to do it right, then maybe you hired the wrong person.
I shouldn’t have said that last part. It was unprofessional, emotional, born from hurt rather than logic.
But God, I meant it.
Because the Calvin who showed up demanding press coverage and immediate announcements—that was the same Calvin whoshowed up at my cottage in Maine. The businessman who sees everything as a transaction, who measures success in headlines, who doesn’t understand that some things require time and care and can’t be rushed.
I thought he’d changed. I really did.
I thought the man who made toys for my daughter and held me in his tent at night while we talked about futures… I thought that was the real Calvin. The one he’d been hiding under layers of defensive armor.
But maybe I was wrong. Maybe that was just another performance. A way to get what he wanted—my expertise, my cooperation, my body—until something more important came along.
Like headlines. Like proving his father wrong. Like validation from the world that matters more than respecting the work.
Ella stirs beside me, making sleepy sounds, and I pull her closer, breathing in her baby-shampoo smell, feeling tears prick my eyes.
I let him in. Not just into my life, but into hers. I let Ella get attached to him. Let her call him by name, trust him, love him. And now, when we leave, because we will have to leave, she’ll be hurt too.
Mike taught me this lesson. Men say what you want to hear until it’s inconvenient. They seem supportive until your needs conflict with theirs. They act like they care until they don’t. And I fell for it again. Let myself believe that Calvin was different just because he was good with my daughter and made my heart race. My picker is still broken. Maybe more broken than I thought.
Dawn light begins to filter through the tent, and I realize I’ve stayed up through the night. My head is throbbing, and I’ll be no good when it comes to concentrating on the site.
But maybe that doesn’t matter. As excited as I am about yesterday’s discovery, I have to face an important truth: I don’t own what I’ve found here in the desert. I’ve only been borrowing it for a short amount of time.
I wait until after breakfast, which he doesn’t show up for, to confront him. Ella is with Fatima, happily eating fruit and making a mess, and the team is preparing for the day’s documentation work at the tomb site.
I find Calvin in his tent, already on his laptop.Probably drafting press releases, I think as bile rises from my stomach.
