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return to Luxor, where he would join me.
    “Time in Egypt,” he said, swirling his Manhattan, “casts a very long shadow. When I’m in this country, I always think how short our human lives are. It’s depressing. Think how many of us it would require to lie end-to-end to take us back to the time of Moses.”
    The mixture of fatigue and gin allowed me to blurt out, “Moses. You believe in the biblical Moses, and I’m not religious.” Had he actually proposed that we marry? I remembered glancing down at the bony mountains of northern Italy. “What makes you think we could get over our differences about religion?”
    “I’m a gentleman,” he answered, wryly smiling. “And an Anglican. We don’t ever need to talk about our religious beliefs.” He glanced up and down my body in a way too intentionally obvious to be offensive. “You might even enjoy High Church ceremony once every few years. At Christmas, perhaps.” He tilted his head, his expression both shrewd and puckish.
    For a moment I remembered that Thom had worried that Gabriel’s faith might be threatened by the discovery of extraterrestrial life. I recalled the pro-foundrepercussions of Copernicus’s astounding notion that Earth was not the center of the universe. Yet the church had survived.
    I laughed. “I hate to admit it, but I do like the ceremony sometimes.” On the heels of laughter, I fought down hysteria, my engulfing grief for Thom, who happily celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah. “Religion is always a quest,” Thom had said, though he was not religious. “Stop questing and know you’ve become a fossil.”
    “I’m not as dedicated to endless research as Thom was, bless him,” Gabriel went on in his casual, friendly way. “But if we were married, we could travel constantly. Where would you like to go with me?”
    “Russia. I loved Tolstoy’s novels.
Anna Karenina.”
    “The Russian Madame Bovary.”
    “Their authors murdered them, don’t you think?” I asked.
    He ignored the question. “What about
War and Peace?
What about Dostoyevsky?”
    “Anna K.
is a better novel than
War and Peace.
The characters are more complex. But Dostoyevsky—he’s too extreme for my taste, a fanatic.”
    “Quite right,” Gabriel answered pleasantly. “At least our literary tastes are compatible. Another day we’ll check off art. Matisse but not Picasso, I presume. Whatever made you become an art therapist?”
    “Another night,” I said.
    “I look forward to it,” he answered, taking the hint, but he hesitated. He bowed his head, then leaned toward me and touched just with the tip of his finger the cord around my neck. “What’s this?” Carefully he pulled on the silk cord till the memory stick emerged from under my blouse. “Thom’s flash drive? I wondered what became of it.”
    “It’s comforting,” I replied, feeling invaded.
    “It could be useful, scientifically,” he speculated. “Thom always used his flash drive at the end of a presentation. It was where he kept his latest thoughts, his grand summary. He always had a grand summary at the end of these big meetings. Did you know that? A moment when he drew all the data together, gave it his own brilliant spin, and made his next new insight seem inevitable.”
    He stopped and looked at me too hopefully.
    “I gave you his briefcase. All his notes,” I said. “The memory stick is for me.” I began to feel irritated, a little vulnerable.
    “But you’ve removed your wedding ring.”
    I said nothing.
    When Gabriel bowed his head and seemed chagrined, I remarked, “Did you say there was
camping
on this tour?”
    He lifted his face, and his eyes twinkled in their wry and engaging way. “On the edge of the Sahara. The tents each have a small solar-powered air conditioner.”
    Then, because I had not heard the terms of math uttered for three years, I asked impulsively, “Tell me again, the equation for elliptical orbits.”
    “X
squared over
a
squared plus
y
squared