A king is murdered by his own brother, sealed inside a box built exactly to his measurements, and that turns out to be only the first of the ways his body will be taken from the world. What follows is one of mythology's most patient love stories: a wife who searches, finds, loses, and gathers what violence scattered, piece by piece, until something entirely new can be built from it. The story behind why the Egyptian dead needed a king who had once been a corpse.