My eyes swept over death masks, coffins, armchairs. Statues of falcons preparing for flight and of crocodiles lying in wait. Alabaster perfume bottles that would not have looked out of place on a modern woman’s dresser. Gold jewelry that Tiffany’s might have sold that very day in New York City. I paid as much attention as I could to the exhibits so that I would have something interesting to tell Karl when I returned to him, but I will be honest with you: I was as giddy as a schoolgirl with a crush.

Looking back now, it seems plain that I had passed into a sort of delayed adolescence on my first visit to Halle’s Department Store. After decades of defining myself by what I would not do, what I did not want, what I could not be … Well, my young friend Mildred had allowed me to see myself in an entirely new way—as a grown woman really, making my own choices, hearing myself think.

And what I thought that first afternoon in the Egyptian Museum was, Forty minutes … thirty minutes … ten minutes, and then I will see him again.

I made myself stay inside a while longer to keep my eagerness to rejoin him from being too obvious. When at last I allowed myself to go back outside, Karl was sitting on a stone bench in a cool green square a few steps from the entrance and waved to catch my attention.

“An hour!” he called, releasing Rosie and grinning as she dashed toward me and danced at my feet, wagging herself almost in half. “I warned you, didn’t I? Quite overwhelming!”

He had assembled a picnic for us: tomatoes, creamy goat cheese, disks of soft flat bread dotted with blackened, bubbled dough. “These tomatoes are delicious,” he told me when I joined him on the bench. “I am thinking of importing them to Europe. A man could make his fortune that way. And so, Agnes, what was the best thing you saw?”

I chewed, and thought, and swallowed. “Akhenaten,” I said, and then described the winsome oddity of that strange pharaoh with his soft little potbelly and long lantern jaw. There he sat, basking in the sun with his beautiful wife, Nefertiti. I was especially intrigued by their peculiarly adult children, sitting on the royal laps or playing at their parents’ feet. The children looked like Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb.