[eBook + Audio Story excerpt] "He held out a silver gift box dressed with an antique, ornamental white silk ribbon and slid it across the wood coffee table toward her. The box seemed to merge eras. At first, it held the glint of the kind of old-fashioned box you might see in old movies, in that scene when a man gives a woman an orchid corsage and begins to sing. A secret box stuffed with love letters, or a stolen cache of jewelry that might accidentally fall from the dusty top shelf in a shop full of curios." "Sarah slipped the silky ribbon off, pulling it over the entire box without untying it. On the lid was a faint, scratchy pattern in faded black blotchy ink. A delicate shape. The jeweler that gave it to Mark could have been pulling a sly act of tongue-in-cheek whimsy when he said he had the “perfect gift box for ya, on me,” but in truth he was finally ridding his heavy heart from the decades of unbearable gloomy love affairs the box hid for him. And the original artisan who made it, if they were watching, would see the faint yet indelible marks they had made with a burning pen so long ago, and, perhaps, reaching across time, whisper to the room that the broken pattern beneath the silvery bow had many names, an Ankh being but a very old one, a merging of male and female energies, it was told, a merging of eternity and everything else in the expanding middle passage animating this arching oval key shape atop the solid, immutable cross." [end excerpt]