Chapter 8
Jessica
Five days left.
I’d been counting them like a death row inmate counting down to execution, treating each sunrise as both a gift and a theft, each sunset a reminder that time was running out.
We’d fallen into a rhythm, Anubis and I.
Mornings exploring Cairo, afternoons in museums or markets, evenings that bled into nights tangled in hotel sheets, lost in each other and that impossible golden light.
I’d stopped trying to keep it casual. We both had.
The sex was... transcendent. That was the only word that came close.
Every time we came together, his divine nature manifested with more strength.
Gold light filled the room, the sensation of infinite space pressing against my consciousness, and there were moments where I could swear I felt the boundary between life and death dissolving.
It should have terrified me. Instead, it made me feel more alive than I’d ever been.
But with Anubis, it was more than just the physical.
It was the way he listened when I talked about Sophie, about my failed marriage, about my fear that my best years were behind me.
I loved the quiet moments on his felucca rides, his hand in mine, watching the sun set over a city he barely recognized anymore.
I loved the way he looked at me, like I was worth the pain we both knew was coming.
I was in love with him.
I hadn’t said it out loud. Neither had he. But it hung between us, unspoken and enormous, the way storm pressure hangs in the air before lightning finally tears the sky open.
It was early afternoon, and we were in bed when my phone rang.
We’d made love twice already that day, once in the shower and once against the wall by the window, and were dozing in that pleasant, exhausted haze that comes after incredible sex.
Anubis was tracing lazy patterns on my bare shoulder, and I was half-asleep, content in a way I couldn’t remember ever being.
His fingers moved slowly, absently, like he was learning braille, like he was committing me to some kind of divine memory.
The ringtone shattered the peace.
I groaned, reaching for the nightstand. “I should check. It might be Megan. I haven’t texted her in a while. Someone’s been occupying my time.”
But the caller ID said Sophie. “Shit.”
My heart clenched. Sophie never called during the day. She texted often, but she reserved phone calls for emergencies.
“Hey, honey,” I said, sitting up and pulling the sheet around myself. “Everything okay?”
“Mom.” Her voice was thick with tears, and my maternal instincts launched into overdrive. “Mom, I need you.”
I was on my feet before I consciously decided to move, reaching for clothes. “What happened? Are you hurt? Are you safe? Do I need to call Aunt Meg?”
“I’m not hurt, not… not like that.” A sob cut her off, and the sound of my daughter crying made my chest ache in ways I couldn’t explain even if I tried.
“Everything’s falling apart. My roommate moved out, I’m failing Organic Chemistry, and Jake broke up with me because apparently he’s been seeing someone else for the last month and everyone knew about it but me. I’m a laughingstock.”
“Jake did what?” Anger flared, white-hot and immediate in my voice.
“I tried to leave you alone. I know how much this trip means to you. I called Dad, but he’s in the Maldives with Amber.
He said I need to ‘learn to handle adversity,’ and that college is about ‘building resilience.’” Another sob.
“And I just… I can’t do this anymore, Mom. I can’t. I’ve tried to be strong.”
I sank back onto the bed, my free hand pressed to my forehead. “Okay. Okay, honey, take a breath. You can do this. You are doing this.”
“I’m not. I’m a mess. Everything’s a mess.”
“Where are you right now?”
“In my dorm. Alone. Because my roommate left, and all my friends are in class, and I needed to hear your voice.”
My throat tightened. “I’m here, baby. I’m right here.”
“When are you coming home?”
“Five days.” My heart sank through the floor. I had five more days in Egypt. Five more days with Anubis, and I wanted those days with a ferocity that scared me. I wanted them like oxygen, like the feeling of a warm bath and hot soup after a bone-chilling cold.
I looked at Anubis. He was sitting up now, watching me with those golden eyes, and I could see the moment he understood.
The moment he knew what I was about to say.
Something broke in his expression. Not breaking, exactly, because I wasn’t sure he could break the way I could.
It was more like a candlelight flickering behind a window.
Gone before you were sure you’d seen it.
“I think I can change my flight,” I said. “If I can, I can be home in three days.”
“Really?” Hope flooded Sophie’s voice. “You’d do that? You’d cut your trip of a lifetime short for me?”
“Of course I would. You’re my daughter.” Even though my heart was breaking, I would always put Sophie first. She would always come first, no matter what.
That’s what being a mother meant. “I’ll look at flights as soon as we hang up, okay?
And in the meantime, I want you to go to the student health center and talk to someone. They have counselors.”
“I don’t need a counselor. I need my mom.”
“You need both. Promise me you’ll go.”
She fell silent on the other end of the line. “Okay. I promise.”
“Good. And Sophie? That boy is an idiot. You’re better off without him.”
She laughed, but it was watery. “Thanks, Mom.”
“I love you, honey. So much. I’ll text you as soon as I have flight details.”
“I love you too.”
I hung up and sat there for a moment, staring at the phone in my hand. The room felt different. The golden afternoon light looked ordinary now, just sun through dusty glass, like I’d already stepped out of something sacred and back into the regular world without meaning to.
Behind me, I could feel Anubis’s presence. For now, he was solid and warm, and about to be ripped away.
“You’re leaving,” he said. The way he phrased it wasn’t a question or an accusation, more of an acknowledgment, or a confirmation.
“I have to.” I turned to face him. “That was my daughter. She’s falling apart, and she needs me and I…” My voice broke. “I have to go.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” I stood up, needing to move, to put a bit of distance between us.
“Because I’m not sure I do. I came here to feel something other than numb, to remember what it was like to want something for me, and I found you.
I found this. And now I have to walk away from it because real life is calling, and no matter how magical this has been, it’s not real. It can’t be real.”
“Jessica.” My name in his mouth still did something to me. It probably always would.
“My daughter needs me. My real-life daughter, who I gave birth to and raised and is currently sitting alone in a dorm room crying because her father is too busy with his new wife to give a damn.” The anger came then, not at Anubis but spilling over him the way grief sometimes does when it runs out of places to hide.
“That bastard Vinny… He always gets what he wants. He got the house and the new life and the beautiful young wife, and I got my best years spent raising a child alone while he figured himself out. And that’s fine.
That’s fine, because I have Sophie, and she is the best thing I ever did.
But I am so tired.” My voice dropped to almost nothing.
“I am so tired of being the one who shows up.”
He didn’t try to fix it. He just watched me, and in a way it felt like he was holding me.
“That’s my reality,” I said, quieter. “Not this. Not us. No matter how good the sex is, or how much I want to be with you. We’ve been pretending this could work.”
“Have we?” His voice was quiet.
“Haven’t we?” I pulled on clothes without really paying attention to what I grabbed.
“Tell me honestly. What were we doing, if not pretending? Tell me there was a version of this where I don’t go back to New Jersey and you don’t return to whatever plane of existence you came from, and we just…
keep having mornings and felucca rides and each other. Tell me that was real.”
He was quiet. The silence lasted long enough that it became its own kind of answer.
“I thought so,” I said.
“Jessica.” He said my name again, and this time something cracked in it.
“What we have been is not pretending. It has been,” he stopped and started again.
“I have existed for thousands of years. I have watched empires rise and crumble. I have weighed the hearts of the worthy and the wicked without sentiment. I have never once envied the living.” He paused. “Until now.”
My body stilled.
“I have no words for what this is,” he said. “My nature does not allow for deceptive words. But do not name what’s between us as pretending. That is the one thing it is not.”
The tears I’d been holding back finally broke in a slow, exhausted spill. It was as if I’d been bracing myself against the tides for so long, my body gave out. I sat back down on the edge of the bed, and he sat beside me, and for a moment neither of us spoke.
“I need to book a flight,” I said when the tears subsided.
“I know.”
I opened my laptop with shaking hands, pulled up the airline website. The screen blurred, and I blinked it clear. He didn’t touch me. He seemed to understand that if he touched me, I would not be able to do this. And that I had to do it.
“The day after tomorrow. At night,” I said, when a flight appeared. “It’s the last one left. Departure at 11 PM. I can spend the day packing.”
“That’s less than two days.”
“I know.” I hovered over the purchase button.
One click. That was all it would take. One click and this chapter of my life - the most alive I had felt in fifteen years - would officially close.
“I know, but Sophie needs me and I can’t…
I can’t put myself first anymore. That’s not who I am. That’s not what a good mother does.”
He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was completely neutral, and somehow that was worse than if he’d argued. “Of course. Your daughter must come first.”
I clicked the button. The confirmation page loaded. Done.
“We should start saying goodbye,” I said, not looking at him. “Treat today and tomorrow as the ending this always was. Make it… I don’t know. Make it mean something.”
“The time I have spent with you has always meant something.”
“You know what I mean.” I set the laptop aside. “We can’t keep pretending this is going to continue. We need to start letting go.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No.” I choked on the word. “No, it’s not what I want at all.
What I want is to not be the responsible one for once in my life.
What I want is another week. Or another month.
What I want is to be someone who gets to be selfish for the first time ever.
” I looked at him, finally, and his face was so open it hurt to look at.
“But what I want doesn’t matter. It never has. ”
He moved behind me, and I felt his presence at my back. His hands settled on my shoulders and I leaned into him, feeling the warmth of him, the steadiness of something ancient and enduring.
“Jessica. Look at me.”
I turned, and his expression nearly broke me. He looked lost and vulnerable in a way I’d never seen, not even when he’d told me about the loneliness of immortality.
“I do not know how to do this,” he breathed. “I have never had to say goodbye to someone I…” He stopped, seeming to struggle with the words. “To someone who matters.”
“Me either. Not like this.” I reached up, touching his face, memorizing the feel of his skin beneath my palm.
“I’ve said goodbye to a lot of things and people in my life.
My marriage. The person I thought I’d be by now.
But this feels… you feel… different. This is going to hurt in ways I’m not prepared for. ”
“Then perhaps we should not do it.”
“We don’t have a choice.”
“There is always a choice.”
I laughed, but it sounded bitter. "What's the alternative? I stay in Egypt forever? Abandon my daughter, my life, everything I’ve built? Live in a hotel room and wait for you to visit between your duties to the underworld?”
“That is not what I am suggesting.”
“Then what?”
He was quiet, and I watched him retreat behind that divine composure, back to neutrality, the way a tide pulls back from shore just before a wave in preparation. “Nothing. You are right. We must face reality.”
His words were kind, but the easy comfort we’d built was gone. In its place was a growing distance; a wall being constructed brick by painful brick.
Anubis took me in his arms and peeled off the clothes I’d haphazardly put on.
He made love to me, soft and deliberate and achingly slow, like he was trying to leave something behind in me, some proof that this had been real.
Then he held me while I cried until I had no more tears left.
We lay there in the growing dark, not speaking, his heartbeat steady against my ear, and I wondered if gods grieved differently than the rest of us, if the weight of thousands of years meant you learned to hold loss without it destroying you, or if it simply meant you had more practice.
I hoped it meant he’d be alright.
I wasn’t sure I would be.
Before he broke the silence. “I will return.”
He stood, and the air around him shimmered in golden light. Instead of its usual transcendence, it felt more like grief, luminous and heavy. Just like the day I met him, he disappeared into thin air.
My head swam, and I passed out.