Before the Unearthing (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798258667250)

Synopsis

Prince Leo is twenty-six years old, first in line to the throne.

He can waltz with flawless precision. He can sustain three hours of immaculate composure in front of a hundred and twelve guests. He knows how to defuse any social crisis in under three seconds. He can do everything. The one thing he cannot do is be himself.

On the night of his birthday banquet, he stands beneath the crystal chandelier counting the forty-seven minutes until he can leave. His mind is not on the crown, nor the marriage negotiations, nor the carefully positioned noblewomen orbiting his attention. It is on a question he cannot name: Is this actually my life?

The answer arrives in the most unlikely of places.

A public footpath. A line of yellow caution tape. A woman with short brown hair and bright eyes - mud-smeared, unhurried, entirely unimpressed by titles - crouching in a Bronze Age excavation site, brushing three-thousand-year-old pottery shards with focused precision.

Her name is Chloe. She runs the dig.

She asks him: "Are you a tourist?"

He says: "Something like that."

It is the most honest thing he has said in years.

From that day forward, Leo begins driving two hours each way, twice a week, to a stretch of countryside where no one knows his face and no one needs him to perform anything. He learns to read soil colour, to work a trowel at the correct angle, to move slowly enough that three thousand years of history stays intact beneath his hands. He learns, for the first time, what it feels like to be genuinely present somewhere.

But lies have a way of surfacing - like everything else the earth keeps.

When his true identity is exposed, when the palace's marriage pressure closes in again, and when the tabloid cameras train their lenses on the professional reputation Chloe has spent twelve years building, Leo is forced to confront the question he has been avoiding for twenty-six years:

Are you willing to give up the life you were assigned, for the life that is actually yours?

Archaeology is the practice of bringing buried things back into the light.

This is a novel about a man learning to excavate himself.

Genre: Contemporary Literary Romance Themes: Royalty - Archaeology - Self-Discovery - Authenticity vs. Performance - The Cost of Choosing