Dawn Edelstein

Quick Facts

• Protagonist; a death doula in Boston and former Egyptology prodigy whose life splits between two versions of herself
• First appearance: Prologue
• Key relationships: spouse Brian Edelstein; daughter Meret Edelstein; former partner and great love Wyatt Armstrong
• Home base: Boston; returns to Egypt in the aftermath of a plane crash
• Occupations: death doula; ex–Egyptology graduate student on the verge of a landmark discovery

Who They Are

Dawn Edelstein lives at the intersection of pragmatism and longing. She tends the dying with levelheaded compassion, yet her mind still orbits the hieroglyphs and desert light of an almost-life she left behind. When a near-fatal crash jolts her out of routine, she must decide whether the steady life she built is the one she truly wants—or whether the version of herself that once chased tomb walls and intellectual fire is still the truest one. Her story embodies Choices and Alternate Paths: not a simple fork in the road, but a sustained reckoning with what it costs to choose, and what it costs not to.

Appearance at a glance:

• Nearly forty; red hair threaded with early gray; fine lines “like the creases of a familiar map”
• Dresses for comfort—baggy travel pants, elastic waists—signaling function over vanity and a life organized around caretaking, not display

Personality & Traits

Dawn’s defining tension is the friction between care and curiosity, duty and desire. Her empathy makes her indispensable to families at the end of life; her intellect makes her indispensable to the work she left behind. The novel tracks how these strengths, when misaligned, harden into superstition, guilt, and paralysis—until crisis forces her to act.

• Intelligent and academic: A standout Egyptologist who published as an undergrad and reads iconography intuitively; when she returns to the field with Wyatt, she still sees what others miss, helping recover an early iteration of the Book of Two Ways.
• Empathetic and compassionate: As a death doula, she asks clients, “What’s left unfinished?” and stays to help them complete it—mirroring the guidance she yearns to accept for herself.
• Conflicted and indecisive: Her life flashes toward Wyatt in crisis, not Brian, exposing a split she’s long managed, not resolved. The book’s branching “Cairo” and “Boston” structure reflects her suspended state until she finally chooses.
• Superstitious: Inherited from her Irish mother—from tricking the Devil before trips to avoiding ladders—external rituals that try to order inner uncertainty.
• Prone to guilt: Over leaving Wyatt and academia, over perceived shortcomings with Meret, and over the cracks in her marriage; guilt keeps her in stasis until the crash breaks the spell.

Character Journey

Dawn abandons academia when family illness rearranges her priorities. She builds a meaningful life—marriage, motherhood, a vocation at the bedside—yet a residue of Regret and Unfinished Business lingers. The crash doesn’t invent her dilemma; it exposes it. Choosing a ticket to Egypt instead of Boston is her first self-directed decision in years, a test of whether the scholar she was can still stand up in the light.

Back in the desert, she and Wyatt reunite as intellectual partners—excavating Djehutynakht’s tomb, reading walls together, rediscovering a language only they share. The discovery that Meret is Wyatt’s biological daughter collapses Dawn’s tidy binary: her “two lives” were never separate. The book’s twin pathways converge in “Cairo to Boston,” then resolve in “After,” where she boards another doomed flight, this time with clarity—choosing love and work aligned over safety misaligned. Her arc is a move from drift to design, from compartmentalization to integration, and from the past as a weight to The Past’s Influence on the Present as a guide.

Key Relationships

• Brian Edelstein: Husband of fifteen years, the ballast after catastrophe. With him, Dawn has stability, home, and a shared devotion to Meret. But comfort curdles into complacency; his near-infidelity, and her inability to stop looking backward, reveal a partnership that’s steady but no longer sustaining her fully.
• Wyatt Armstrong: Her intellectual mirror and romantic counterpart. With Wyatt, conversations become discoveries; fieldwork becomes courtship. He embodies the passion and purpose of her “Egypt” self—less a temptation than a reminder of who she is at her most awake.
• Meret Edelstein: The anchor of Dawn’s Boston life and the measure of her choices. Typical teenage friction—privacy, autonomy, the push-pull of Motherhood and Family Dynamics—intensifies when biology upends the family story. Dawn’s love remains ferocious; the revelation forces her to knit honesty, identity, and care into a new pattern.
• Winifred 'Win' Morse: A client whose own unfinished love becomes a mirror. Helping Win pursue closure nudges Dawn to seek her own, transforming professional scripts into personal imperatives.

Defining Moments

Dawn’s turning points map the slow burn of a life reconsidered into a sequence of decisive acts.

• The near-death experience: As the plane plummets, she sees Wyatt, not her husband—evidence that the story she tells herself about contentment is incomplete. This visceral clarity pierces years of rationalization.
• The choice at the airport: Offered a ticket “anywhere,” she chooses Egypt over Boston—her first unambiguous move toward her own desire, not duty.
• Excavating the earliest Book of Two Ways: Working side-by-side with Wyatt restores her scholarly confidence and proves that their partnership—intellectual and emotional—still generates discovery.
• The DNA test revelation: Learning Meret is Wyatt’s daughter collapses Dawn’s binary and reframes past decisions; the personal and professional, the “Water/Boston” and “Land/Egypt,” were always braided.
• The final decision (“After”): A second crash finds her no longer divided. Sitting beside Wyatt, she demonstrates not just whom she chose but how: with integration, not escape.

Symbolism

Dawn personifies the Book of Two Ways: twin routes—“Water” (Boston’s stability with Brian) and “Land” (Egypt’s passion with Wyatt)—separated by a “lake of fire,” the pain inherent in choosing. Her work as both Egyptologist and death doula casts her as a guide across thresholds: between past and present, knowledge and meaning, life and death. Reaching her personal “Field of Offerings” requires mapping not which path is safest, but which path is true.

Essential Quotes

I have heard that when you are about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. But I do not picture my husband, Brian, his sweater streaked with inevitable chalk dust from the old-school blackboards in his physics lab. Or Meret, as a little girl, asking me to check for monsters under the bed. I do not envision my mother, not like she was at the end or before that, when Kieran and I were young.
Instead, I see him.

This moment cracks Dawn’s self-concept: the unconscious speaks first, and it names Wyatt. The passage reframes the entire narrative as an excavation of desire and denial, with family love acknowledged but not equated with fulfillment.

One of the questions I ask my clients is What’s left unfinished? What is it that you haven’t done yet, that you need to do before you leave this life? ... For me, it’s this. This dust, this tooth-jarring ride, this bone-bleached ribbon of landscape.

Dawn’s professional script becomes a personal confession. She recognizes that the journey she prescribes to others—closing loops, seeking truth—is the one she has evaded, and Egypt is both the setting and symbol of that unfinished business.

I have had a good life. But, maybe, I could have had a great one.

The good/great distinction distills the novel’s ethical tension: Is contentment enough when purpose calls? Dawn’s willingness to risk stability for possibility marks her pivot from maintenance to meaning.

"I know we both made commitments to other people. I think we meant to love those people for the rest of our lives. But things don’t always work out the way we’ve planned. We know that better than anyone."

This acknowledges the collateral damage of her choice without minimizing its necessity. Dawn isn’t romanticizing betrayal; she’s naming the adult complexity of promises made under different selves and circumstances.

Maybe this is all love is: twin routes of pain and pleasure. Maybe the miracle isn’t where we wind up, but that we get there at all.
I open my mouth, and I answer.

Here, Dawn fuses metaphor and action: love as a two-way map, choice as the crossing. The final line transforms contemplation into commitment, completing her shift from passivity to authorship of her life.