And around us I felt the grass and the sea and the sky, and the last of my doubts disappeared. For the first time, I felt light and free and real. My eyes were open, my head was straight, and I loved Mike O’Connor with every part of my being.

Epilogue

Eight Years Later

“Natalie! Get over here!”

The faint cry came as a relief. I’d been troweling all morning, and my back ached from bending over to get at the basket remains. It was a great find; the carbonized cloth remained in such good shape we could see the threads. A conservationist from NUI was coming in this afternoon to work on it, but until then I was the lead.

Still, I was happy to straighten my shoulders, roll my neck, and lope across the field toward one of our new units. We’d just moved over to a new area in the northwest, since the entire site seemed to slant this way. This unit was the farthest one yet, after we’d used a different geophysical testing that handled the dense soil better.

People waved as I jogged past. We were nearing the end of our eighth season, but Kilkarten wasn’t slowing down. We now had a crew of three dozen, and for the past two years we’d hosted a field school for the local archaeology students.

My crew chief beamed up at me from inside the unit, her copper curls caught up on top of her head. I crouched down on the dirt ledge and peered into the unit. Seven feet and still going. At the bottom, a pile of blue-green circular disks spilled out of a cracked container. The oxidized metal pieces were scattered in the dirt.

The sight swam before my eyes and I leaned back on my heels. “What is that?”

Anna laughed. “Free money.”

“Don’t be cute.” I slid down into the unit. Under the dirt and grime of age, I could make out the shape of a wreathed head, the embossed, familiar letters.

Roman coins.

A cache of Roman coins.

And then my gaze slid away to the curves right next to it. This wasn’t the only vessel here; I could see the outline of amphorae in the dirt. My vision narrowed on one of them, with familiar handles and a familiar lip, and a very distinctive white inlay on the black background. An inlay that had been very popular in Rome in the first century BCE.

I let out a rush of breath, and then gave Anna a fierce, elated grin. “I’ll be right back.”

And then I was running across the fields.

Mike met me halfway. He wore a Kilkarten Field School T-shirt and jeans. He’d been the leading force behind the school since he’d retired from the Leopards two years ago. He joked that he liked teaching kids who were even more clueless about archaeology then he was. Also, some of them were young enough he thought he had a chance of convincing them that football meant touchdowns.

I let out a shriek and threw myself into his arms. He caught me and spun me about. “What is it?”

I pressed my lips against his jaw. “I don’t think that’s part of our site. Maybe it’s why we have a site.”

He set me down and brushed the strands of hair that had fallen out of my ponytail back, grinning at me the whole time. “What are you talking about?”

“Kilkarten’s sixth century. But there are coins over there from long before that.” A laugh bubbled up and out of me. “And there’s a vase that is almost definitely first-century.”

His eyes widened. “So...”

“We found it! We found Ivernis!” I kissed him with all the happiness of eight solid years of love and a life together, with the desire and passion of first love, with the joy of a dream made real. Three dream—Ivernis and Kilkarten and him.

He smiled his crooked smile, the sun in his eyes. “I take it you’re happy?”

I nestled my head against his chest, reveling for a moment in his warmth. “I didn’t need Ivernis to be happy. I just needed you.”

Then I broke away and grinned as I jogged backward. “But I am pretty damn excited.”

And I turned and ran across the green land, breathing in the salt and sea. Before me, the earth opened up to reveal a lost city tended by dozens of my friends, and beside me, Mike’s feet pounded against the ground, in step with my own. And in that moment, like so many moments in the last years, I could taste perfection, could feel it thrumming in my bones, resonating with the land and the people who surrounded me. When I stopped, I saw the past at my feet and my future beside me as Mike’s hand took mine. My heart ached with the wonder of it all, and I leaned my head back to the bright, cloudless sky, and I laughed.

* * * * *

Can’t get enough of the new adult genre?

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Rush Me

When post-grad Rachael Hamilton accidentally gate-crashes a pro-athlete party, she ends up face-to-face with Ryan Carter, the NFL’s most beloved quarterback.