Ellie raised her hands to his face, cradling the long, familiar lines of it as a wonderful warmth bloomed inside of her.“You are perfect for her.It’s mad I never saw it until now.You are going to make each other brilliantly happy.You have my blessing—not that you require it.But I’m wholeheartedly giving it to you anyway.”
Neil’s eyes shimmered with tears.“Peanut…”
“But please don’t let me catch you mauling each other like that again,” Ellie pleaded.“That wasnotan image I want permanently etched into my brain.”
“You think my brain isn’t already etched with whatever you and Bates are getting up to?”Neil protested.“It’s horrifying!”
“Stick-in-the-mud,” Ellie accused.
“Harridan,” Neil shot back.
“Prude.”
“Stumpy.”
Ellie narrowed her eyes.“I amnotstumpy.”
“You are a bit.”Neil grinned down at her.
At the warm sight of that grin, Ellie felt a shiver of worry.
“Adam and I are going to pretend to be married,” she blurted out.
Neil’s eyebrows rose.
“You know my feelings on the institution of marriage,” Ellie pressed on.“Adam respects all of that very deeply—which is part of why I am so dreadfully fond of him.Only traveling around as though we’re merely friends—or that he’s your friend, and not even mine particularly—feels absolutely wretched.I don’t want to do it anymore.Not when it’s so far from the life we really want to be living together.”She swallowed, her throat tight with worry.“Could you… understand that?”
“You and Bates living together in sin?”Neil filled in.“I can’t say I’m thrilled about the notion, but I’d thought it was already happening, more or less.”
“It has not!”Ellie protested, taken aback.
“You mean the two of you haven’t been…” Neil started with obvious discomfort.
“Er…” Ellie replied.
The smile she plastered onto her face was halfway to a grimace.
“Never mind.Don’t tell me.I don’t want to know.It doesn’t matter anyway.Well, I mean—it matters, but…” He drew in a breath, working to gather himself.When he spoke again, his voice was clear.“I just want you to be happy.Both of you.If this is how you can do that, then of course I support it.”His look of certainty collapsed into one of deep unease.“But what are you going to tell Mum and David about it?”
Ellie thought of her lovely, boring, slightly clueless father and her loud, affectionate, and mildly hysterical stepmother.
“Maybe we can worry about that one a little further down the road?After Adam and I get back from Korea.”
“Korea?”
“It’s… Adam’s father,” Ellie explained helplessly.“And there’s this scholar there, and the land of the immortals, and…” She gave up with a sigh.“We have to go, but it won’t be forever.And we’ll be careful—I promise.But what about you?Have you and Constance talked about where you plan to go after all this?”
“No.But there’s this notion I can’t get rid of, Peanut.About Thinis.”
“The lost capital of pre-dynastic Egypt?”Ellie felt a rising pinch of excitement.“But scholars have been searching for it for centuries.No one has ever been able to pinpoint its location.”
Neil’s reply brightened with a fervor that matched her own.“Except that I found something at Gebel Tukh in the tomb of an Old Kingdom Eighth Nome official—a reference to sealing the royal tombs at Thinis!”
“Fiddlesticks!”Ellie breathed out reverently.“But Neil, if that’s genuine… Maspero did theorize that it must be located somewhere near the modern city of Girga…”
“And there are several unexcavated early settlement sites there and a necropolis nearby at Beit Khalif,” Neil filled in.“Which strongly indicates that the region was inhabited during the early dynasties of the Old Kingdom.”His brow creased with worry.“Do you think Connie would be amenable?”
“To searching for a fabled lost city said to hold the treasures of Egypt’s first pharaohs?”Ellie filled in dryly.“No, I don’t think you’ll have too much trouble on that front.”
