6. Laney
LANEY
I brushed dirt from the edge of the trench with my fingers, working the trowel carefully around what looked like a shard of pottery.
The sun was high enough that I'd pulled my hair back twice already, sweat trickling down my neck despite the morning coolness.
My knees ached from crouching. Chiara was ten feet away cataloging yesterday's finds, humming something under her breath.
The dig house sat behind us, its door propped open with a rock, papers visible on the table inside.
This was the fourth trench we'd opened this season. Three had turned up nothing but dirt and disappointment. This one, though — this one had the wall line I'd been looking for, the foundation that would prove what I'd suspected for years.
The sound of tires on gravel made me look up.
A rental car pulled into the clearing, dust rising behind it.
I knew who it was before the door opened.
Nate unfolded himself from the driver's seat, squinting in the sunlight, and raised a hand in greeting.
He looked much as I remembered — taller than I'd expected, which was ridiculous because people don't grow in their thirties, sandy hair going gray at the temples, field boots worn soft.
He'd probably had those boots since graduate school.
"You found it," I called.
"Your directions were good." He walked over to the edge of the trench, looking down at me with that crooked grin I remembered from graduate seminars when someone made a point he agreed with. "You going to make me stand up here, or can I come down?"
I laughed. "Come down."
He dropped into the trench beside me, easy and confident the way he'd always been in the field, and crouched to see what I was working on.
God, it felt good to have someone here who understood what this was.
Someone who knew what he was looking at, who wouldn't pat my shoulder and ask when I'd be done playing in the dirt.
"How long have you been working this site?" Nate asked.
"Ten years." I sat back on my heels, wiping my hands on my jeans. "On and off. Mostly on."
His eyebrows went up. "That's dedication."
"That's what happens when nobody pays attention to whether you're dedicated or not." I flushed as soon as I said it. God, Laney. "Sorry. It's been a long week."
Nate didn't push. He just nodded and stood, offering me a hand up.
I took it, and he pulled me out of the trench in one smooth motion.
His hand was warm and callused, exactly what you'd expect from someone who spent half his life digging.
I remembered that grip from a dozen field schools, a hundred days spent working side by side in trenches like this one.
"Show me," he said.
I walked him through the site, pointing out the sections we'd opened, the test trenches Chiara had started last month, the wall line that suggested a structure nobody in the family believed existed.
The pottery scatter that indicated habitation.
The coin we'd found two weeks ago, corroded but identifiable, that dated to the late Republic.
Nate asked good questions — the kind that meant he was actually listening, not just being polite.
He crouched by the trench where I'd been working, traced the edge of the wall with one finger, and looked up at me with something like wonder.
"This is good, Laney."
A tightness closed around my throat. I wanted to say something clever, something that would make it seem like I didn't care whether anyone thought my work was good or not, but I couldn't get the words out.
Like an idiot, I just stood there blinking at him until he stood up and brushed the dust off his hands.
"Can I see your documentation?" he asked.
"It's in the dig house."
We walked over together, Chiara watching us with open curiosity that I didn't have the energy to deflect.
Inside, the dig house was cool and dim, smelling like old wood and the faint must of paper that had spent too many summers in a place without air conditioning.
My field notes were spread across the table, months of careful work laid out in ink and pencil and the occasional frustrated margin scrawl when something didn't line up the way I'd expected.
The genealogies I'd traced. The archival photographs. The maps.
Nate pulled out a chair and sat, picking up the top notebook without asking.
I stood by the window, arms crossed, watching him read.
It was strange having someone look at my work like this — really look, not skim and nod and change the subject.
He turned pages slowly, sometimes going back to check something, his mouth moving silently as he read my annotations.
He reached for the genealogy next, unfolding it carefully.
I'd spent two years on that document, cross-referencing church records and land deeds and family histories, building the line backward through the centuries.
His finger traced the connections, the marriages and births and deaths that tied the present family to the Roman settlement I was excavating.
"Jesus," he said quietly.
I didn't answer. My pulse was doing something stupid in my throat, jumping like a live wire. I hated that I cared this much what he thought, hated that his opinion mattered when my own husband's didn't.
Finally he set the notebook down and looked at me. "You've tied this site to the family name."
"Yeah."
"You've got documentation going back to the Roman era."
"Yeah."
"Laney." He leaned back in the chair, shaking his head. "Do you know what you've done here?"
I shrugged, trying to keep my voice even. "I've proven what they've always claimed about their bloodline. Not that they care."
"Not that they — " He stopped, staring at me like I'd said something in a language he didn't speak. "This is publishable work. This is career-making work. What are you doing burying it out here where nobody's ever going to see it?"
The tightness in my throat got worse. I turned away, looking out the window at the dig, at Chiara bent over her cataloging, at the palazzo's distant roofline barely visible through the trees.
My hands were shaking and I hated that they were shaking, hated that I couldn't just be cool about this, couldn't just laugh it off the way I should have been able to.
"I'm married into this family," I said. "This is what I do now."
"This is what you're wasting now." Nate stood, crossing to stand beside me.
He wasn't touching me but I could feel the heat off him, solid and steady and so much like the old days when we'd spent hours arguing over the layers of a dig in the university lab that my chest ached.
"Laney, listen to me. You need to leave this dig behind and get your career back. "
I laughed, but it came out wrong — too sharp, too bitter. "Just like that?"
"Just like that." His voice was firm, the way it got when he was sure about something and wouldn't be moved. "I'm meeting Professor Benedetti in Rome next month. You remember him?"
"Of course I remember him."
"He asks about you every time I see him.
Wants to know what you're working on, whether you're publishing.
" Nate turned to face me fully, his expression serious.
"The two of us can write you a letter of recommendation together.
A real one. The kind that gets you back into academic circulation, gets your name on your work again. "
My heart kicked hard against my ribs. "Nate — "
"You have to come to Rome for it," he said.
"In person. Benedetti will want to see you, talk through what you've been doing.
But Laney, this is real. This is your way back in.
You bring your documentation, you sit down with us for an afternoon, and we write you a letter that will open doors you thought were closed for good.
Conferences. Publications. Your name in the journals again, not buried under theirs. "
I wanted to say yes. God, I wanted to say yes so badly it hurt.
I could see it — Rome, sitting across from Professor Benedetti in his cluttered office, talking about my work like it mattered, like I mattered, like the last ten years hadn't been me digging alone in a corner of an estate where nobody even bothered to visit.
My name on a paper. My work recognized. Corrigan, not Mrs. Lombardo.
But I couldn't get the word out.
Nate waited, patient the way he'd always been when someone was working through a problem, and when I didn't answer he frowned. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong."
"Laney."
"It's complicated," I said, and hated how small my voice sounded. I crossed my arms tighter, staring out at the dig. "Things at home are . . . there's a rift. In my marriage."
The words hung there between us, heavier than I'd meant them to be. I felt him go still beside me, careful in a way that meant he'd heard what I wasn't saying — that this was bigger than I was making it sound, that I was in over my head and didn't know how to get out.
"How bad?" he asked quietly.
"I don't know yet." I swallowed hard. "I asked Massimo to come out here four times. He hasn't come once. And at dinner the other night his brother mocked my work in front of the whole family, and Massimo just . . . he didn't laugh. But he didn't defend me either."
Nate was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "That's not a rift. That's him not seeing you."
My chest hurt. "Yeah."
"So come to Rome," he said. "Get your name back on your work. Make him see you."
I wanted to believe it was that easy. I wanted to think that walking into Professor Benedetti's office with my documentation, with Nate and his reputation behind me, with a real letter of recommendation in hand, would somehow fix what was broken in my marriage.
That Massimo would look at me differently if I had my career back, if I was Corrigan again instead of just his American wife who played at archaeology in her spare time.
But I didn't know if that was true. I didn't know if anything would make him see me the way he used to, in the early years of our marriage when he'd come out to the dig every weekend, fascinated by the work, proud of what I was doing.
Before his family had gotten their claws in, before I'd learned to be quiet, before I'd convinced myself that being invisible was the price I paid for being his wife.
"I'll think about it," I said.
Nate nodded. He didn't push, which I was grateful for. We stood there in silence for a moment, and then he reached out and squeezed my shoulder once — brief, friendly, nothing more.
"You've done good work here, Laney," he said. "Don't let them bury it."
After he left I stood in the dig house for a long time, staring at my field notes.
The family would ask who'd come to visit.
They always asked, always wanted to know who I was seeing, what I was doing, as though I might be up to something that reflected badly on them.
And I'd tell them it was a friend from university, which was true.
I wouldn't tell them it was Nate. I wouldn't tell them what he'd offered me.
I didn't know why I wanted to keep it to myself.
Maybe because if I told them, they'd find a way to take it from me before I even decided whether I wanted it.
Maybe because this was mine, and I was so tired of everything being theirs — the dig, the estate, the name I'd buried my own under, the daughter they'd claimed as a Lombardo before she'd even learned to walk.
Maybe because for once I wanted something that belonged to me and nobody else.
God, what was I even doing?
I picked up the top field notebook, running my thumb over the cover.
Ten years of work. Ten years of careful documentation, of tracing the family line back through the centuries, of proving what they'd always believed about themselves — that they were old blood, that their name meant something, that they were rooted in this place like the stones I was digging up.
And not one of them had ever come out here to see it.
I set the notebook down and walked back out into the sunlight. Chiara looked up from her cataloging, shading her eyes with one hand.
"Everything okay?" she asked.
"Yeah," I said. "Everything's fine."
It wasn't fine. But I didn't know how to explain that to her, didn't know how to put into words the feeling that I was standing at the edge of something — a decision, maybe, or a breaking point, or just the moment when I finally admitted to myself that I'd been invisible for so long I'd started to believe that was all I was.
That being Massimo's wife meant being no one at all.
I crouched down beside the trench, picking up my trowel. The pottery shard was still there, half-buried, waiting. Like everything else I'd been digging for.