❝death is only the beginning.❞
Mara El-Masri's fascination with the long-ago world of ancient Egypt started with the stories her stepfather would tell her when she was a child. Her brother Talib El-Masri is missing, left after their mother's funera...
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THE STREETS OF CAIRO were as lively as ever as people bustled from place to place. The blazing sun was beating down on Mara El-Masri and she was thankful she'd worn her cloche hat to this lunch with her stepfather. The pair sat across from each other at a table outside a restaurant surrounded by the chatter of the streets. He wore a hat himself in an attempt to beat the heat, though his was made of straw and he sat facing away from the sun. Mara was getting the glares right in her eyes and kept pulling the hat down to avoid it.
"So you enjoyed the book?" Mara inquired with a smile, her English accent lilting, as Jamil slid the book, bound in red leather, across the table to her.
He never stayed in Cairo for long, only a week or so each time, and he never told her what he was doing here besides visiting her. This was the first time he had asked her for a book to read so he could defeat his boredom when things cooled down (from what, he never said), and so Mara had asked her friend and coworker for her recommendation. This book, a first-person step-by-step recount of finding the boy king's tomb written by Howard Carter himself, was the one Evelyn settled on recommending after a few hours of back-and-forth between this one and many others.
Jamil nodded as Mara placed the book in her purse to return it to the library at the museum. "I thought I knew everything about the discovery, but it seems I did not." Where his stepdaughter was English (a Londoner born and raised), Jamil was from Cairo itself and Mara always thought him an amateur Egyptologist because of all the stories he told her. For some reason, it pleased her to know he could still be surprised by this country's history despite being from here. "You must tell your friend she's found her calling."
"As a recommender of books?"
"As a librarian."
Mara laughed lightly. Evelyn Carnahan was, like herself, an aspiring Egyptologist, and a dear friend. She was also a librarian whose favorite place was surrounded by books and seemed to fit the stereotype of librarians to a t. Mara didn't have that in common with her; every time Evy had tried to teach her how to properly code and catalog the library, it failed. She said, "I'm sure she'll be happy to hear that. You could come by the museum and tell her yourself."
There was that look again, that vague glint in his eye that she'd seen so many times in her life, but never more than when she started work at the museum after moving from London to Cairo to pursue her lifelong dream of being an Egyptologist after her mother died. He was hiding something from her and she'd spent her entire life trying to figure out what it was, why he visited Cairo so much and kept his itinerary a secret.
This is what she couldn't understand. He had raised her on the stories of the old gods and goddesses, of the pharaohs that ruled Egypt. He was the reason she wanted to be an Egyptologist and yet when she told him she was going to be moving to Cairo in order to do it, he hadn't wanted her to. He never told her why. She thought it was because he didn't think she was up to the challenge.
