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her hand, Carly didn’t get why her father was so excited about the hot, dusty place he’d dragged her and her mother to. But with this imagined playmate before her, she could finally see the city that had once been on that mountain in Turkey. At four, Carly could barely pronounce “archaeology,” but now she understood why her father wanted to dig his way into those ancient lives. She wanted to dig, too.
    A lot changed after that trip.
    She didn’t know it, but her parents had already decided to split up. In the fall her father moved to Ohio for his job. Less than a year later she and her mother moved in with Nick, and Carly grew up a city girl, surrounded by concrete and glass and asphalt and steel. But as she walked those concrete sidewalks or rode metal buses over asphalt streets, she’d always wonder what was underneath the hard surfaces, what stories were buried, waiting to be discovered. She never forgot the feeling of holding those little pieces of someone’s long-ago life, and unlike most kids—who change career plans every other day—she couldn’t imagine doing anything else but archaeology.
    Even after she figured out that her discovery was a setup.
    During her visits to Ohio, she’d spend a lot of time in her father’s lab at Denman. The more she learned about archaeology in general and that dig in particular, the more suspect her discoveries seemed. It eventually dawned on her that the likelihood of finding all that stuff in the same spot was pretty low. Archaeological digs went on for years, decades even. Actual discoveries of artifacts were relatively rare. Most of the work was in the digging itself, the careful removal of layer upon layer of soil and sediment, which then had to be tested and analyzed and dated. One layer a few inches thick could represent hundreds of years. A hole a few feet deep could tell a thousand years of geological history.
    When she finally asked him about it years later, Carly’s father admitted that he and some of the other grad students planted the stuff for her to find.
    “I wanted you to have fun. And see what it was that took me away from home so much. I wasn’t trying to make you into an archaeologist. It isn’t exactly a growth industry, you know.”
    Oh, she knew. Carly’s mother reminded her of it whenever her plan to major in archaeology came up. And Carly’s father, who was still a little afraid of his ex-wife, halfheartedly tried to discourage her by telling her how boring and tedious the day-to-day work could be.
    But Carly knew that nothing about archaeology bored her father.
    And nothing about it—not even the slow, tedious, painstaking digging and brushing—bored her, either.
    Though she hadn’t been back to Aphrodisias, Carly had still managed to find archaeological opportunities in the much less ancient city of New York. She’d dug for artifacts in its junkyards and landfills with Nick, helping him find materials for his sculptures. She’d worked on the site of a colonial-era farm out in Brooklyn, where she’d touched more shards than she could count, bits of blue-and-white pottery that had belonged to the original Dutch settlers.
    Something happened to her when she saw places where people lived thousands or even hundreds of years before, or touched things they touched. Whenever she visited her father’s office, he would unlock the glass case her “discoveries” were kept in and let her hold them. As her finger traced the faded artwork on that shard, she could still see the little girl her imagination conjured thirteen years before. Planted or not, the shard was real, and it really was two thousand years old. Someone’s robes were held together by that fibula, and those coins were passed from hand to hand in that place which once was a city.
    Now she was finally going back to the place where it all started, the place where they worshipped the goddess of love. Her father, who was now in charge of the dig, had gotten a big grant, and Carly was