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found her resting place.
    When she at last struggled to her feet, she passed the flashlight over the chamber again at ground level. She started back, hitting the wall, sucking a painful gasp into her clogged throat. For long minutes she stood, staring at what was before her. Her mind whirled, denied it, tried to make sense of it. When she couldn’t, she jerked the light away and passed it over the rest of the chamber, over the myriad objects scattered on the floor, the torch sconces embedded in the wall.

    Sconces with fresh, unlit torches in them.
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    H ER unsteady heart pounding, she hobbled to one of them, used her lighter to set it ablaze. Avoiding what was in the center of the room, she moved to the other sconce. The resulting light created an eerie hourglass-shaped set of shadows on the floor, reminding her of her earlier thoughts about her own internal hourglass. She switched off the flashlight with cold fingers.
    Air currents carried the smoke away, indicating other hidden passages, or small fissures engineered to keep the chamber vented.
    Which meant her sudden cloying sense of being pressed on all sides must be coming from her mind, not the chamber.
    Given the past five years of her life, she knew her mind wandered between reality and fantasy more than it should. To retune her brain fully to a reality station, she’d probably need an M&M bag full of prescription drugs. But Farida had brought fantasy together with reality, and Jessica had used all her training as a scholar to be certain, knowing she was anchoring all that she had left of herself to her belief that the story was real. Wasn’t it?
    She pushed away the grim specter of logic, which was trying to fight to the forefront of her mind and make her consider what was in the middle of the room. No. Nothing was going to ruin this place, a monument to enduring love, faith. Hope.
    Turning her attention back to the rest of the tomb, she saw the floor was composed of hundreds of polished stones. Different types, sizes and colors, brought out by a glaze on the smoothed top of each. In that glaze, a dried flower had been pressed and preserved.
    She swallowed.
    When I lie in his arms, he tells me we will travel everywhere. In every new place, he will pick the most beautiful stone, and the most beautiful flower. Each time we come home, he will add them to our bedroom floor, so that when I am an old, old woman, I will look over it and remember all the places we have been together . . .
    She gripped her hands together, since there was no one else’s to reach for, to give her courage, reinforcement. Taking a breath, she began to move, one slow, disbelieving step at a time, toward the sarcophagus in the center.
    The immediate circle around the stone dais was ankle deep in fresh flower petals, the source of the exotic scent she’d smelled. Jess stopped outside of that boundary and removed her boots and socks. Lifting the lace scarf of her discarded hijab back over her head, only then did she move forward, for this was as sacred a place as any church she’d ever visited.
    The dew-kissed silk of the petals brushed over her bare feet, their caress thickening the emotions in her throat. “No wonder he couldn’t let you go,” she murmured. “He never let you die.” Her whisper echoed in the chamber, stirring the air, stirring spirits. But she wasn’t afraid of spirits. She was too close to becoming one of them. As swept away as she’d been by the tale, even she had underestimated how much he loved her. This wasn’t a tomb. It was an enchanted cave, holding a sleeping princess.
    Farida’s sarcophagus was embellished with floral engravings and Arabic. While she wasn’t fluent, Jess caught “Beloved” and
    “Woman of Honor.” Stepping onto the dais, she drew close to the open coffin, for there was no lid. She gazed down into the face of a woman dead three hundred years, who looked as if she had simply fallen asleep.
    Turned on her side, with her folded hands tucked