Gabriella Maselli McGrail and Paul English

Nearly twenty years after Vita broke off contact with Royce, he writes to her, determined to excavate the past. He is older than her, a ghost from her university days, a former benefactor she has tried hard to forget. In his own youth, Royce spent two fateful summers working on a dig in Pompeii with a woman he would later memorialize with a scholarship - the same one that Vita eventually received.

From opposite sides of the world, Royce and Vita enter into an adversarial dance: an attempt to settle old accounts.