Marco’s familiar face came into focus on my laptop screen. He was lean and tanned, his cheekbones and jaw visible beneath thinning skin, his easygoing nature tattooed into smile-lines around his eyes and mouth. Curiously, I touched the screen. In an archaeology of his face, I peeled away accumulated years, layers of strata, to find the man beneath, who I once loved. Who had loved me. Marco smiled, knowing, and no doubt noticing similar changes in me.

‘Country life is kind to you,’ he said at last. ‘You’re looking good, Phoebe.’

‘I’ve been in classrooms while you’ve been getting sun damage,’ I told him. ‘Still raiding the lost ark?’ I felt dizzy. This chatter was part of a parallel universe.

Marco grinned. ‘Maybe not. But this is more exciting than other work. Herding infants, for instance.’

I laughed. ‘You wanted to ask about something.’

His expression became anxious. ‘Australia’s on the news. Fires near your place.’

I closed my eyes, looking away until I realised this would worry him even more.

‘I should have told you.’ This truth was reflected in his eyes. It rained once when we were digging in Rome. The team became desperate to shelter the site from water damage. The ancient elements from which the world was made – earth, water, air, fire – were dangerous.

‘Are you all right?’ He saw something in my eyes too. ‘Caleb? Is he okay?’

‘He was hurt. Only a bit.’

‘Hurt? What happened?’

I didn’t need to tell him everything. Couldn’t bear to. ‘His head. He’ll be all right. He has a good doctor.’

‘But he’s okay? It was just a concussion? Phoebe. You should have told me.’ Marco glanced at his keyboard. Behind him rose the anonymous white wall of a distant Italian hotel room.

‘You’re a long way away,’ I observed.

‘Let me know if you need anything, okay?’

‘Okay. Can we just discuss your work for a while?’

‘I hoped we could. I gave a speech at the Rome conference. An impromptu after-dinner thing. A few statements comparing today’s USA to Rome. Dictatorships. Tyrants.’

He’d always been a political loudmouth – funny, inclined to find trouble. ‘People enjoyed it. I’ve been asked to write a human-interest piece about Nero and fake news. We wrote these pieces together back in uni.’

He remembered. ‘We could still do something like Horrible Histories for adults.’

‘Maybe. How does this sound? Fake news isn’t always fake, and certainly isn’t new, argues archaeologist Marco Ossani.’

‘You might have a point. What will you say?’

‘I haven’t got it all worked out yet.’ Marco hadn’t changed. He was still all ideas and objects, wanting someone else to do the boring textual research. ‘I want to mention ancient equivalents of Twitter and Instagram.’

‘Equivalents?’ He was an escape. ‘Most Romans couldn’t write.’