Statues watched as Van descended into what was left of the Temple of Venus.

June warmth had settled over the Gulf of Naples, sticky enough to raise beads of sweat against the back of Van’s neck, but down here, the air was cool and still. Trapped almost. His boots crunched against the stone floors, dust stirring as he lit the oil in his lamp.

Behind him, Atlas fumbled down the last few steps with his eye pressed against his camera. “The papers are going to love this.”

The camera flashed, and Van blinked. It was a newfangled thing, all black and chrome with a pop-up bulb. Atlas carted it around everywhere, snapping photographs of the excavation’s progress. Atlas Exploration Company couldn’t exist without the deep pockets of Atlas’s family, founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Ancient Art, and those deep pockets required proof that their prodigal son wasn’t merely gallivanting around Italy.

In the dark of the temple, the echo of the flashbulb stained Van’s vision. The wrinkle between his brows dug itself deeper. Terse, he said, “Watch it.”

“Relax, pal,” Atlas said with an echoing laugh. “It’s not like it’s booby trapped.”

It wasn’t anymore. Because Van had disarmed all the traps the first time he followed the hidden staircase leading him deep beneath the earth.

“And we need a picture to go underneath the headline.”

Van snorted. “What headline?”

“ ‘Young Scholars Resurrect the Lost City of Pompeii,’ ” Atlas said in his best broadcaster voice.

“More like ‘Van Keane Discovers the Treasure of the Vase of Venus Aurelia.’ ”

“Where’s my name in that headline? You wouldn’t be here without me.”

With his white-blond hair greased, his collared shirt neatly pressed, and that Zeiss camera strapped around his neck, Atlas was better at funding and documenting excavations than he was at participating in them.

Van ignored him and trekked deeper into the temple, following the chipped tiles where they led to a marble altar, flanked by stone sentries. Five legionaries had been carved from white marble, etched with dark veins. They each perched on engraved pedestals that bore a Latin inscription. Instead of a gladius, bows strapped across their backs with full quivers of stone arrows. Venus’s guardians.

Atlas circled the guardians, weaving between their pedestals. “Aqua, Ignis,Terra, Aura, and Mors.”

One for each of the elements, and a fifth: death. Where the rest were depicted as broad-shouldered soldiers in greaves and paludamenta, the statue of death’sskeletal frame had been pierced through the chest with a carved arrow, right into a heart bleeding red.

Somehow, it watched Van, just a skull with empty eye sockets. As if it could sense the shard in his pocket, that the treasure it had been sculpted to protect had returned home.

“The only one left standing in our way,” Atlas said as he placed his hand on Mors’s bony shoulder. Our way, Van balked. “I wonder what his trial will be.”

Does he know what I have done? Van could still feel the cobwebs clinging to his skin. Couldn’t shake the catacomb cold from his limbs.

But then a wide, naive smile crept onto Atlas’s face. “What are you waiting for?”

Van hovered over the altar. Three black porcelain shards had been arranged so that their jagged edges aligned. They’d fit together like puzzle pieces. Two more and the Vase of Venus Aurelia would be whole again.

“Drat. The shard. It’s with my journal,” Van said, rolling out his shoulders in agitation. He pressed a finger to his temple. Forgetful. Believable. “I forgot it back at camp.”

Atlas squinted. “That’s unlike you.”

“Is it?”

“You barely take your nose out of that diary of yours.” Another one of his piercing laughs cuts Van right to the marrow.

“It’s not a—”

Atlas clasped a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll grab it. Left side under your pillow, right?”

Van frowned. “That’s supposed to be a secret.”

Glancing over his shoulder, Atlas was already running toward the entry staircase. “I thought we didn’t keep secrets.”

He was the closest thing Van had to a best friend, a brother.

“Don’t do anything until I get back, okay?” Atlas called back. “Promise me.”

“Promise,” Van yelled after his receding footsteps.

And then he waited, still until the temple door slammed. His palms slicked with sweat. Could he really do this?

Steadying himself, he withdrew the fourth shard from his pocket. And then a fifth.

Gold danced across the surface of the Vase’s pieces. Delicate brushstrokes depicting myrtle blooms and rolling waves were woven together by a string of Latin that could only be read when all five shards were reunited. If Van had been able to understand Latin at all.

Flat on the altar, he pressed the seams of two pieces together.

Aureus, amor aeternus et cor—

As soon as the last shard was fitted into place, the Vase burned Van’s fingertips. Hot. He staggered backward as the pottery began to float, light emanating from each shard. Gold dripped in the seams, fusing the shards back together.

Then, it stopped. The light dimmed. Van batted away the sudden darkness like he did after one of Atlas’s poorly timed photo ops.

This was it.

Before he could step to the Vase, it shattered. Five shards clattered against the stone altar, but they didn’t break. Van reached for them, and a shout died in his throat. Where his fingertips should have brushed porcelain, there was nothing. The shards had vanished.

They couldn’t have vanished. That was absurd. The Vase of Venus Aurelia was myth, not magic. The key to a hidden treasure: vast piles of gold, undying fame, a way to finally be someone.

They’d fallen under the altar. That must have been it. There was always a logical explanation.

He moved to take a step, but his foot turned heavy. Stuck. Van strained, stretched. It did nothing. He couldn’t move. He glanced down at his boot as the leather paled, faded, warm brown sapping to cool white. And like twining ivy, it climbed. Marble spread from his fingertips up his forearms, over his shoulders, down his chest.

Van struggled, fighting a scream for no one, until the very moment his heart turned to stone.

Margot loved nothing more than a good story. A call to action that couldn’t be resisted and a sweeping adventure, a big reveal and a grand gesture. A kiss at the end, obviously. Windswept and sunlit and lipstick stained. The kind that made a girl believe in happily ever afters.

As she strode the paved streets of Pompeii, Margot flipped through a leather-bound journal, soaking up each slanted line like it was a New York Times bestseller. The pages had warped and wrinkled, yellowed at the edges from the last century. Dirt smudged over sharp-edged penmanship. At the front, written in heavy letters, ink pen dripping, it read: Property of Van Keane.

Each entry was dated back to the summer of 1932, starting on a June day not unlike this one. Van was only eighteen, but his team included some of the first archaeologists to dig their shovels into Pompeii’s sunbaked earth. She paused toward the journal’s middle, where the scribbled entries abruptly stopped. Nestled between the pages was a photo.

There were others, of course. Black-and-white snapshots capturing first glimpses of Pompeii as he dredged the city up—but this was her favorite. Van’s hair was light, cropped on the bottom but longer on top, somehow both coiffed and careless. He had been sculpted in harsh lines and sharp relief. His mouth was pressed tight, eyebrows cinched. Hunky. Brooding. Totally her type.

It was the last photo of Van ever taken. He didn’t know it back then, but later that night, while he scraped back the centuries by the light of an oil lamp, the ground would shake, shift. Unstable, the dig site collapsed. He’d gone too deep when the ceiling caved, crushed beneath the rubble with no chance at escape. It wasn’t just Pompeians buried here. Somewhere below the earth were his bones, too.

He died making history.

In his last entry, he’d written, Out here, there are only elements—sun, earth, a freesia breeze, and a sea so sparkling it isn’t hard to believe Venus herself rose from the foam and chose this land as her own.

Margot lifted her head to survey the city, letting the salt air thread through her chin-length curls. On a good day, they were unruly, but Italy’s June-warm humidity had turned them outright unmanageable. She kept them out of her face with a satinscarf tied behind her ears. In this century, everything smelled like the teetering cypress trees and the oily faux-coconut of Banana Boat sunscreen. Still, Margot might have been walking exactly where Van had, surveying the same land.

Except she should have been watching her step. Too late to do anything but brace for impact, Margot barged straight into a classmate. She rebounded, scuttling backward and losing her footing, and plummeted directly into an ocean of plastic tarps.

Okay, ouch. That was definitely going to bruise. She blinked up at the frescoed ceiling, cherubs flying dizzy circles overhead.

None other than Astrid Ashby peered down at her. Her fair skin didn’t stand a chance this summer beneath the harsh Italian sun, and her stark blonde hair had been pulled into a high pony, letting curtain bangs frame her face. Like the rest of the students at their excavation site, she wore a white T-shirt with Radcliffe Prep Archaeology stamped in the school’s maroon on the breast pocket.

Astrid crossed her arms against her chest and barked, “Watch where you’re going, Rhodes.”

Another face appeared, one with wide-set brown eyes and a permanent wrinkle between her eyebrows. Radcliffe’s head of classical studies was a suntanned white woman with deep brown hair that refused to stay coiled in a chignon at the base of her neck, turning a neat bun into little more than curly tendrils spraying out every direction. Dr. Hunt at least looked concerned for Margot’s safety as she extended a hand. “This is not exactly what I meant when I said we’d get up close and personal with history, Miss Rhodes.”

The entire class watched, snickering, as Margot hoisted herself out of the pit of doom. A whirlpool of embarrassment swam in her chest, a drowning tide. She took a breath and forced a smile. At least, she tried to. But Astrid’s laser-beam glare threatened to disintegrate her at any moment.

“She’s a threat to our whole excavation,” Astrid said. Did she seriously just stomp? They were about to be high school seniors. Nobody stomped anymore. “She shouldn’t be here.”

Dr. Hunt placated Astrid with a tsk. “Every student chosen for this trip had to submit the same assignment. Margot’s earned her spot here as much as anyone else.”

Astrid fumed. “She’s never even taken an archaeology class!”

“Good thing this is a summer class,” Margot said. “For learning.”

“Some of us are taking this seriously.” Astrid tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, haughty. “And at least the rest of us actually followed the essay assignment and didn’t write glorified self-insert fan fiction.”

Margot’s blood pressure rose so high her ears throbbed in time with her pulse. She pressed her fingertips into the soft of her palms until she was certain she’d leave permanent indentations. “Just because you won some dumb award—”

“The Pliny Junior Scholastic Award of Linguistic Achievement in Latin.”

“—doesn’t mean you’re better than everyone!” Frustration swelled, tears welling in Margot’s eyes, but she blinked them back. Exactly the kind of thing everyone expected from her. Too soft. Too emotional. Too loud. Too much.

Astrid grinned, a wicked slice of perfectly straight teeth. The poster child for orthodontia. “Not everyone. Just you.”

When Margot squeezed her eyes shut, she saw Van’s easy smile. God, the things she’d do to have the uninterrupted confidence of a white man. He’d probably just laugh. Astrid’s comments wouldn’t even make a dent in his armor.

Margot wasn’t like that. The snide look on Astrid’s face seared into the folds of her mind, branded her skin like a hot iron. She didn’t know how, in the wise words of Taylor Swift, to shake it off.

She opened her mouth, a tart retort already forming, but before she could say anything else, Dr. Hunt stepped between them with palms spread wide. Every interaction Margot had with her, she had exuded Cool Aunt energy, but right now, her professor was all business. “I’m going to operate under the assumption that it’s the jet lag talking and give you two a chance to work this out. Rhodes, Ashby, you’re partners for the summer.” She turned to the other eight students selected for the summer abroad and added, “The rest of you, pair up. Rule number one, always use the buddy system.”

A murmur coursed through the students, but Dr. Hunt fixed Margot with a stare.

“Put the notebook away for now,” she said, lowering her voice, “and try not to destroy a UNESCO World Heritage site on the first day of our dig.”

Margot nodded. It wasn’t like she could argue around the lump in her throat.

In the last six years, Margot had tried on countless versions of herself. Ballet, watercolor painting, musical theater, six months of violin lessons—like a Barbie playing dress-up. Nothing ever stuck. And Astrid was right about one thing. As the class paired off, Margot recognized most of them from passing glances across campus and evenings spent organizing the school yearbook, but not from class. Because Margot had never stepped foot in an archaeology classroom.

She’d only decided to take a real stab at archaeology a few weeks ago after finding a flyer for Dr. Hunt’s trip posted on the library’s bulletin board. Six weeks in the south of Italy, soaking up the sun, discovering ancient artifacts, solving millennia-old mysteries. Plus, helloooo, Italian boys.

Three nights in a row, she curled over her laptop with an IV drip of caffeine, hammering away page after page on her application essay. A few hundred Google wormholes later, she’d basically taken a crash course on Roman antiquity. She triple-checked her margins, double-spaced it, and slid her essay into Dr. Hunt’s office with only an hour to spare.

But these students, they all knew each other, needling elbows into each other’s sides and cracking jokes that went way over her head.

Astrid grabbed the only other girl on their trip by the arm. “Suki, partner with me.”

Suki Takeda was tall and slim with light brown skin, and she fiddled absentmindedly with the ends of her deep brown braids. She’d wasted no time taking a pair of scissors to her class T-shirt, and instead of the brown boots everyone else wore, Suki opted for a chunky pair of Doc Martens. “Nice try. I’m working with Rex.”

“He looks a little . . . preoccupied,” Margot said. She pointed over Suki’s shoulder, where Rex Yang sparred against Topher Kitsch, a Black boy with box braids, using shovels like gladiator swords.

Suki put two fingers in her mouth and whistled so loudly a bird crowed, fleeing the branches above them. Rex and Topher snapped to attention. Running over, they flanked Suki on either side. “Rex,” she said, “you’re with me.”

Rex raised his eyebrows so high they disappeared beneath the harsh line of his black hair. Mostly limbs and sinewy muscle, Rex moved with easy grace Margot knew had to be from hours upon hours of cheerleading practice. He smiled. Easy, confident. “If you say so. Sorry, Toph, you’re on your own.”

Astrid, evidently desperate to escape Margot like she was Typhoid Mary, pivoted. She raised her eyebrows at Topher in a silent plea.

Topher raised his open palms and said, “No way. I’m going to see if Calvin still needs a partner.” Then, as if realizing Margot was literally standing right there, added, “No offense, Margot, but you’re not . . .”

“Archaeologist material?” Astrid offered. There was a lilt to her voice, mean-girl playful. “Who wears red lipstick to a dig site anyway?”

Astrid linked arms with Suki, and the boys trailed after them. Every remark died on Margot’s tongue.

So, what? She wasn’t the daughter of some bigwig west coast museum curator like Suki, and she didn’t hail from a long line of archaeologists like Astrid, but what did it matter that Margot grew up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Georgia town, taking etiquette classes with Miss Penelope instead of memorizing the names for each layer of sediment? She wasn’t embarrassed to try something new. And she definitely wasn’t going to be embarrassed about her lipstick. The leading lady always had a calling card—a signature scent or a beauty mark. For Margot, it was a perfect shade of red lipstick.

Dr. Hunt led them deeper into the excavation site—a shell of stone walls with a labyrinthine floor plan and enough tarp-covered pits that they really should have had school-issued helmets. The first doorway opened into a wide foyer. Crackingfrescoes caked the walls. Soft blues faded into pastel pinks. They must have been dazzling jewel tones when they were first painted, but everything lost its color with time.

“This summer, you and your partner will document all of your findings and write a report that touches on the meaning of these discoveries and why it was meaningful at its time of creation.” Dr. Hunt steered the class around a bend, revealing a tent-covered courtyard and five roped off dig plots. Pines jutted out from the harsh soil, hedges encircled fountains that must have once drizzled streams of clear water, and ivy dripped down the walls like gelato on a hot day. “Collect your tools, and let’s get started.”

Margot scooped up two full sets of items—brushes, a picket, a fancy measurement device, some shovel-looking things. Rex and Suki knelt at Plot E, already digging into the hardened earth.

Astrid, on the other hand, sulked at the edge of Plot D. Apparently the D in Plot D stood for Definitely going to lose her freaking mind. Astrid’s eyes were darts, and Margot was the target.

“Here,” Margot said, holding out a second set of tools. “I grabbed some for you.”

“I’m good,” said Astrid.

Suki giggled into the palm of her hand. From a leather pouch, Astrid unsheathed a gilded shovel with a glossy wood handle, burnished with an insignia Margot couldn’t quite make out. Astrid huffed onto the metal and polished it on the sleeve of her shirt.

The extra shovel thudded against the dirt, slipping out of Margot’s fingers.

Astrid asked, her ice-blue eyes narrowed, “Why’d you steal a spot on this trip?”

Margot sagged. “I didn’t steal anything from anyone. You heard Dr. Hunt—”

“Please, Pasha Manikas scored a ninety-nine percent on the Classical Archaeology final last quarter. We were going to be roommates.” Astrid sniffed, puckered like she smelled knock-off perfume. “Your essay shouldn’t have qualified. It was fiction, for god’s sake.”

“Dr. Hunt seems to disagree,” Margot countered, but regret wormed into her stomach, burying itself in her gut.

The students who had been selected for the trip had their application essays posted on the school website.

There had been Suki’s—“Charon’s Obol: An Investigation of the Roman Afterlife.”

Astrid had titled hers “Eternal Languages and the People Who Spoke Them.”

Then, way, way at the bottom was Margot’s: “All Rhodes Lead to Rome.”

And maybe it was self-insert fan fiction in the literal definition of the phrase. Margot had written about finding the Vase of Venus Aurelia, pouring in details from Van’s journal. The Vase was Pompeii’s greatest treasure, blessed by Venus herself to grant whoever pieced it back together unimaginable wealth and notoriety, the promise of being loved by all who encountered you. If Margot discovered it, she’d never be dismissed for being too girly, too indecisive, too irrational again—she’d be respected, understood, appreciated. Loved.

The only problem was that, according to legend, Venus shattered the Vase, deeming the power too much for mere mortals. If anyone was able to complete each of her five trials, they would be rewarded with a piece of the Vase. But that was the hiccup. It was just a myth.

There was no road map. No flashing arrow saying Trial of Venus, due north! No one had ever seen all five pieces. No one until Van.

“You’re never going to find that stupid Vase,” Astrid snapped. “People have been looking for it for the last two thousand years.”

Margot shrugged, batting her lashes. “Maybe they just didn’t know where to look.”

“But you do? You don’t know a trowel from a spade.” Astrid laughed, cutting. “Forget it. I’m not letting you ruin my GPA because you think you’re Lara Croft.”

Margot held on to Van’s journal like a buoy in a raging sea. Her heart slammed against her rib cage, emotion bubbling back up. Her dad always said she felt things too much. That she thought with her heart instead of her head. It wasn’t her faultthat her heart had a megaphone and her head had anxiety.

Before she could scream or cry or both, Margot bolted out of the tent and scaled the short stone wall, landing in an alleyway. The distant din of Astrid’s laugh trailed after her, but Mount Vesuvius loomed in the distance. On a day like today, the skies blue and a gentle wind lifting Margot’s hair off her neck, it was hard to imagine the mountain demolishing an entire civilization under ash and dirt. For centuries, this town, these roads, had been buried. Abandoned and forgotten.

Now, cobbled streets and colonnades had been pried from the earth’s grip and exposed once again. Margot could almost imagine the faded ink lines of elevation maps the original explorers must have charted when they first arrived, like all the places Van had touched turned golden in the afternoon light.

Margot slid onto her butt, curling her knees to her chest, and wormed her arms out of the straps of her backpack. She pried open Van’s journal and it fell back to the last entry. The spine had probably creased, she’d flipped to this page so many times. Her index finger trailed over his penmanship, feeling the grooves where his pen indented the paper.

Sitting here, she could almost imagine him next to her. His tawny hair, his knife-sharp jaw, the way his linen shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. The heroes in romance novels always smelled like sandalwood, and he probably did, too. Like sandalwood and salt, a trace of evergreen—that intangible scent of a day spent outside.

He’d searched for the Vase even though no one else believed it could exist. Like believing in soulmates or the Loch Ness Monster—both things Margot was happy to trust were out there somewhere. He would have understood Margot. She was sure of it.

Unzipping her mustard-yellow backpack, she dropped Van’s notebook into its depths, right between a beaten-up paperback novel and a wad of linen she miraculously snuck through airport security. She didn’t dare breathe as she unwrapped the artifact.

Red clay, painted black. Streaks of gold wove across the exterior, myrtle blooms and a fragment of Latin painted at the edge, the last word broken off. A piece of something spectacular, like glass before the mosaic.

A shard of the Vase of Venus Aurelia.

Technically, Margot hadn’t been trespassing when she found the shard. Her school library’s archives were strictly off-limits, unless you had written approval from the head librarian. Which she totally had.

Admittedly, she was supposed to be doing research for her final English paper, a thematic interrogation of her all-time favorite novel, Relics of the Heart by Catherine Avery Hannigan.

In the book, rival archaeologists Isla Farrow and Reed Silvan scoured the Mediterranean for an artifact believed to be nothing more than a story: the Vase of Venus Aurelia. Their adventure—long nights together, searching for the Vase, finding each other instead—had captivated her mom. The first time Margot read it after unearthing it from a box her mom left behind, she’d been spellbound, too.

Her copy had seen better days. The mass-market romance was all roughened edges and curled corners from being read and read again. She could still remember her mom hunkering down with it on the hammock she’d string up in the backyard each June. Every time Margot fanned through the pages, they smelled like those summers: coconut-scented tanning lotion, heaping scoops of strawberry ice cream, and freshly washed cotton sheets, sun-dried.

So, really, it wasn’t Margot’s fault that her foot slipped on the library’s rolling ladder in the section on Roman mythologies or that Van’s journal happened to be right where she landed. Definitely not her fault that behind it, wrapped in faded muslin, was something curious. Something uncatalogued—and therefore unmissed when she’d slipped it into her pocket.

The library at Radcliffe Prep was filled to the brim with antiques—priceless artworks, one-of-a-kind prints, and first edition texts. How they filled that library wasn’t something they advertised, and whatever kinds of questionable collection development tactics they used didn’t really matter to Margot. But she had never expected to see a Vase shard, like she’d stepped inside the pages of Relics of the Heart.

Unfortunately, Isla and Reed’s archaeological escapades conveniently underrepresented the dirt under her nails, the sweat clinging to the back of her neck, and the sunburn not even Supergoop! could keep at bay. And that wasn’t even counting the trek over to Italy. By the time they made it back to their hotel, Margot’s limbs had achieved the consistency of overcooked pasta. The jet lag and heat exhaustion combo punch was enough to KO somebody.

Yesterday, when they’d first arrived at Hotel Villa Minerva—which was so small it hardly counted as a hotel, let alone a villa—Dr. Hunt had doled out room assignments, but Margot already knew her fate. There were only three girls on the trip. There was a triplet bedroom with their names on it.

Sure enough, room 320 beckoned them. The third-floor suite was drenched in teal paisley wallpaper, and a lopsided chandelier clung to the ceiling for dear life. Bouquets of silk flowers and faux ivy had been draped over the tops of a cedar armoire. It was giving Grandma chic and smelled appropriately like mothballs and lemon cleaning spray.

There was one single bed and a set of bunk beds. Astrid had unceremoniously Neil Armstronged her suitcase onto the single bed like a flag on the moon, which left Suki and Margot to rock, paper, scissors for the bunks.

Margot had started saying, “I’d really like to—”

“I sleepwalk.”

Margot blinked. “You sleepwalk?”

Suki batted Lancôme-long lashes. “I once walked all the way to In-N-Out in a dream. I bought a double-double with cheese, Margot. You’ve got to give me the bottom bunk.”

And that was that. Better to squish than be squished, she reasoned.

Tonight, Margot landed on her bunk with an oof. All right, maybe she minded a little bit that her mattress was evidently a layer of bricks thinly disguised beneath a bedsheet. But the way the exhaustion hit her, she knew she wouldn’t be awake long enough to care.

Suki and Astrid trailed in after saying good night to Rex, Calvin, and Topher across the hall.

“You know, I didn’t think you were going to last the whole afternoon, Margot,” Astrid said.

“Thanks for the concern,” Margot huffed, muffled into her pillow.

“I’m serious.” Palm to her heart, Astrid looked like she really thought Margot was going to fall for her fake sincerity. “I don’t know how you’re going to survive the entire summer.”

Margot shuffled onto her elbows, irritation chafing every nerve. Suddenly sleep was entirely out of the question.

Astrid sighed. “God forbid you break a nail.”

“Don’t worry. I brought my gel kit.”

Astrid’s grin was anything but sweet. The kind of saccharine smile that accompanied a good, old-fashioned bless your heart. “I’m sure you did.”

Suki leaned around the bedpost. “What colors did you bring?”

“Suki!” Astrid griped.

“What?” Suki asked. “Free mani.”

Astrid rolled her eyes so far back, Margot was surprised she didn’t strain a muscle. “The point is that you’d only pass this class because we’re partners. Without me, you’d be completely helpless.”

There was no graceful way to flop over on a bed to come to your own defense. It was more fish-out-of-water than anything. When Margot finally righted herself, she said, “I know I’m not a pedigreed archaeologist, but I’m here.”

“Please. You don’t know an amphora from a krater. I bet you don’t last the week,” Astrid said.

Margot dropped down the ladder and squared her shoulders. Heat worked over her skin, her body temperature rising. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Astrid didn’t back down. “I’ve seen enough. Everyone else has done fieldwork before. You aren’t ruining my summer for me, one way or another—you’ll either give up and crawl home, tail between your legs, or I’ll get it through Dr. Hunt’s head that you don’t belong here, and she’ll send you home.”

Margot didn’t bother excusing herself to the bathroom. When she felt that first prickle against the back of her throat, she knew the waterworks were coming. She slammed the door behind her, and there was a crash on the other side. Guilt twined around her ribs—her overreactions never came without a price—but she couldn’t stop herself.

Her eyelashes clumped together, wet with tears. She ran her hands under cold water, letting the chill sink into the soft skin of her wrist. Her therapist said it helped soothe her central nervous system and deactivate fight-or-flight mode. Which was definitely needed at the moment. Red crept up the column of her neck like being around Astrid all afternoon had given her a bad rash.

As much as she hated to admit it, maybe Astrid was right. It was only day one. Her manicure was already wrecked. How was she going to survive six whole weeks?

An exhale shook Margot’s lungs. She couldn’t keep crying. Not right now. This was what she always did—she jumped headfirst into something, exhilarated and determined, but swam to shore when the waters were deeper than she imagined. Not this time.

Reaching into her pocket, Margot clutched the shard from the Vase. She traced her fingertips along the flecks of gold. It was a charm, warding off Astrid’s evil energy. When Margot looked at it, the ground beneath her feet felt solid again.

She’d made it this far. And maybe, she could belong here.

Like a shot from a starting gun, the gazillion-year-old corded phone she’d seen on the side table rang with a vengeance. Margot nearly leaped out of her skin, and she poked her head through the bathroom doorway. Astrid crouched on the floor and swept up the fragments of a black coffee mug, broken into chunks of porcelain—it must have taken a nosedive when Margot slammed the door.

“Easy. Don’t Hulk out on us again,” Astrid said as she deposited the pieces on the dresser. Then, turning over her shoulder, she snapped, “Are you going to answer that or what?”

“Do I look like a receptionist to you?” Suki grabbed the screaming phone and answered with a gruff “What’s up?” While whoever was on the other line spoke, her eyes zipped toward Margot. She pointed a finger at her and mouthed, It’s for you.

But it couldn’t be for Margot. Because no one knew she was here.

Suki nodded as if the caller could see her and then said, “You’re looking for Margot? Margot Rhodes?”

Margot shook her head wildly. Eyes wide, pleading.

“How do I know you’re not some creepy stalker?” A pause. “Oh, you’re her dad?”

Doomed. She was absolutely doomed. Margot clasped her hands at her chest, namaste-style. She begged with a harsh whisper, “Please don’t say I’m here. Don’t say anything about me. Tell him you’ve never heard of me.”

A few mental calculations placed it around one p.m. in Dogwood Hollow, Georgia. Lunchtime for her dad, breezing between meetings to grab balsamic and burrata paninis at Evelyn’s corner café. Late enough for him to realize she wasn’t answering his texts about whether or not she wanted potato salad on the side, which was a dead giveaway because Margot always wanted potato salad on the side. She’d masterminded the whole plan—it wasn’t that hard to disappear for six weeks. How could this have happened?

Suki listened for a second. “Yeah, okay. She’s right here.”

Margot’s whole body slumped. “Are you kidding me?”

“He said he was going to call the school back to unenroll you.” Suki covered the receiver with the palm of her hand, shoulders shrugged up to her ears. “Also, your dad sounds like kind of a DILF.”

“Suki,” Margot hissed.

“Just saying.”

The phone burned when Margot held it to her ear. Her voice sounded stiff, pinched. “Hiiiiii.”

“Hey, Gogo,” her dad said from the other end, and her heart squeezed at the nickname. Behind him, she could hear the bluebirds singing and the faint hum of the street quartet’s string instruments—they always gathered in the town square on Friday afternoons. Rupert Rhodes could hardly walk ten steps without saying hello to someone because when you’re the Deep South’s small-town version of a real estate mogul, you basically know everybody. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“What do you mean? You sound like you’re running late for a new client meeting. Maybe I can catch you after work.”

His sigh could be felt across the Atlantic. “You mean today or six weeks from now?”

Every brain cell in Margot’s head shifted into overdrive. Last night, while he was showing a house over in Copper Springs, she’d left a note under his coffee mug, outlining the details of her flight. Except she’d said she’d be boarding a flight to New York City to spend the summer with her mom in Manhattan doing . . . whatever it was her mom did without her. It wasn’t like her parents were on speaking terms. There was no way it could have backfired this badly this quickly.

But he’d called her. On a corded phone from the last millennia.

“Have you talked to Mom?” she asked, chewing on the inside of her cheek. Could he tell the way her voice hitched? The problem about being the human embodiment of a mood swing was that Margot couldn’t hide her emotions to save her life. Lying to him was out of the question. She’d orchestrated this so that she wouldn’t have to lie. At least, not to anyone’s face.

“Sort of,” her dad bristled. “I left her a voicemail and then got a text saying she had no idea you were coming for the summer, and if she had, she wouldn’t have booked a two-month hiking trip down the Appalachian Trail.”

“That’s so weird because—”

“Tell me the truth, Gogo,” he said. “Why did I get forwarded to a hotel concierge named Giuseppe when I called your school office?”

“Because I’m in Italy.”

Even 4,300 miles away, she knew the way his eyebrows would worry together, creased down the middle in a wrinkle that never fully went away. “Little Italy?”

Margot picked at her bottom lip, flaking off bits of pigment. “No, uh, the big one.”

Someone on the other end honked—probably at her dad for stopping, stunned, in the middle of the street, if she had to guess. It was like the cogs started spinning in his head again. “Dr. Hunt’s excavation. You went to Pompeii even when I told you not to. I knew sending you to that boarding school was a huge mistake.”

“Dad, I—”

“I can’t believe you would do this, let alone how you managed to pull it off.”

It was, Margot wagered, a rhetorical question. Her dad didn’t really want to know that she’d forged his signature on the permission slip so that she could turn it in on time. Or that she’d signed up for a part-time job at the campus coffee shop, spending her evenings brewing vanilla lattes for tired-eyed seniors and saving every cent so that she could afford her plane ticket without asking him to help pay.

He was the whole reason she was here in the first place. If the Vase of Venus Aurelia could make everyone love Margot, that had to include Rupert Rhodes.

“I earned this spot, Dad.” Much to the chagrin of the blonde-haired brownnoser conveniently eavesdropping on this conversation from the other side of the room. Margot dropped her voice, just for good measure. “It’s not just a phase this time.”

“It’s always something with you. But this is too far, Gogo. I’m booking you a plane ticket home.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I can. I can’t be anything but serious right now. I wish you would try it. You’re just like your mom sometimes.” Another agitated breath blew into the speaker, crackling on Margot’s end of the line. “The second you’re back on American soil, you’re grounded for the next century.”

Margot sank onto the windowsill. The phone’s sticky beige cord wrapped around her as she leaned her chin into her hand. The last dregs of evening sun splashed everything in Aperol orange. Aperol she still wasn’t legally allowed to drink until the end of summer (the drinking age in Italy was eighteen!), but she wouldn’t be here by then if her dad had his way. There was a whoosh of air on his side, and Margot could practically feel the bite of the air-conditioning in his downtown office. She was running out of time to convince him.

Clutching the receiver so hard her fingers felt like they might snap off, Margot pleaded, “I’m working on this really important research project that will be completely life-changing. If you just let me stay. Two weeks, even. One week. Dad, I promise—I’ll never leave my dishes in the sink ever again.”

“What’s that? Hold on.” There was a rustle, the sound of him covering the phone with his hand, and a hushed back and forth. “Margot, I’ve got to run. Client emergency. I’m buying you a ticket. You’re coming home. Not next week. Now. End of conversation.”

It always was. Because nothing Margot did was ever enough for him.

For the last six years, it had only been the two of them. Her mom vanished after enough shouting matches to leave them all feeling battered and bruised, and her dad became the single father of an only daughter. He was the one person she could hold on to, but he’d retreated into his work, out of reach when she needed him most.

Before the divorce, he’d always known how to calm her down with two hands on her shoulders, their foreheads pressed together like maybe he could transfer some of his cool-tempered tendencies to her through osmosis. She couldn’t help but laugh when his eyes blurred together up close.

But lately, it was like they were constantly speaking different languages. He was always running around town, busying his days with buyer calls and his nights with paperwork. These days, the only time he made for her was to tell her she was messing something up or overreacting.

Margot knew her dad better than anyone else—how he took his coffee, how he swore there was a left and right sock, how he refused to watch movies with sad endings—but it was like he didn’t know her at all. Or, worse, he did, and still didn’t love her.

The Vase of Venus Aurelia could fix that. Would fix that. It had to.

Suki and Astrid watched expectantly as Margot set the phone back on its receiver.

“So?” Suki prompted.

There was really only one thing to do. Margot forced a smile that definitely didn’t reach her eyes. A pathetic excuse for a lie. “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”