Leonard had been excavating Megiddo since before the girls were born. Megiddo, called Armageddon by the Greeks, prophesied in the book of Revelation as the place where armies will gather to battle at end times. But its past went back millennia. Over the course of twenty years, Leonard had dug down through the centuries until he’d hit on the tenth, BC, when, according to biblical history, Israel to the north and Judah to the south had been joined together by King David. Megiddo, Leonard liked to say, was the playground for the big questions about the United Kingdom of Israel. But it had been her playground, too, as every year she had spent the summer watched over by the students, who took turns entertaining her and Rachel until they were old enough to entertain themselves. Then they would spend their days reading paperbacks on the dry lawn at the kibbutz where they lived during the excavation, or swimming in its pool, where chlorine stung their eyes and blurred their vision.

But now Rachel was doing an internship in New York, Monica was in Europe taking care of her own ailing mother, and Leonard had returned to Megiddo alone. Alone, too, Noa slid open the patio door and sniffed the air. The acrid smell of burning was at odds with the buoyant morning sun that drifted through the leaves. Just past seven meant that in Megiddo it would already be five in the afternoon, the hour they began washing the load of pottery shards exhumed that day. At five thirty sharp Leonard would arrive, and the team would pour out basket after basket for his inspection, which he would rapidly sift through, deciding what should be sent to Reconstruction, and what should be discarded. She’d watched the procedure countless times when she was younger, positioning herself near enough to snatch a rejected piece off the table, a terracotta handle or enameled shard that she could salvage from the trash.

Having raised two daughters and been through thick and thin, Leonard and Monica had separated amicably in early spring. The explanation they gave to those who asked and many who didn’t was that after twenty-five years of marriage they were ready for new adventures. What these adventures entailed neither would say, but it was clear to Noa that their terrain would be human rather than geographical. Liberal and evolved as they were, neither saw any great tragedy in their uncoupling, for they would always be friends, Leonard and Monica explained. So amicably did they separate that they had brought Noa and Rachel to the ceremony for the get, required for a Jewish divorce. Brought the girls, as they had once brought them to see a healing dance performed by the San tribe in Namibia, and the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. Monica, impeccable as always, wore a floral dress. Rachel came home from college specially, arriving from the East Coast the day before. The divorce had come as a surprise to them both, but only Rachel was convinced that something had happened to instigate it. Noa would have liked to believe that—to believe that only recent events had been hidden from them, rather than a fundamental truth that went back many years. On the drive there, she listened to their parents run though a litany of stories about how they’d met and the early years when the girls were babies, just as the canonical stories about Leonard’s mother had been recited at her shiva the year before.