Accept that there’s no rational explanation for what happened but have fun trying to find one anyway.

When Jeremy was twenty-eight, he returned to Oxford to visit his mother. She was having a difficult year as Jeremy’s father had died by suicide when he was twenty-eight. It was hard, she said, to wrap her mind around her son now being older than her husband.

On his first night back in town, he found himself at the pub where Thomas Cox and Mary Turner met thirty years earlier as students—The Eagle and Child, though Mum always called it The Bird and Baby. He wanted to sit at the table where they’d had their first date, but someone had beaten him to it.

A beautiful woman sat alone at the table. She saw him looking her way and smiled.

“Am I in your spot?” she asked.

“You might be.”

“I’ll fight you for it.”

“Not mine, actually,” he said. “My parents’, I think. Their first date.”

“You can join me.” She pointed to the empty chair across from her and moved her piles of books out of the way. He took his pint and walked over.

Her name was Chi, and she was thirty-five, from Victoria Island in Lagos, Nigeria. He assumed she knew as much about West Virginia as most West Virginians knew about Lagos—it exists, and people, supposedly, live there. About this, he was very wrong.

“Ah, beautiful place,” she said. “I visited once. The mountains, wonderful…” She fanned herself as if overcome by the memory of beauty.

She laughed when his response was a slightly baffled “Why?”

“The observatory.”

“Green Bank,” he said. He glanced at the books and academic journals. “You’re an astronomer.”

“Physicist. Well, cosmologist. The fun sort of physics. No one makes science-fiction movies about Bernoulli’s principle of fluid dynamics.”

Her laugh was like a bell ringing. They were going to be friends. More than friends?

He introduced himself as Jeremy Turner. He let her do most of the talking and learned her family had moved to London when she was ten. Now, twelve years later, she sounded as English as Mary Poppins, though, like him, she could switch accents when she felt like it.

“Tell me something I don’t know about the universe,” Jeremy said.

“No one knows what ninety-five percent of the universe is made of. How’s that?”

“That’s a lot of universe to have gone AWOL,” he said. “Do you think parallel universes exist?” He’d always wondered if that’s what Shanandoah was, but who could he ask? “Other dimensions or planes of existence?”

Her eyes gleamed with mischief as she reached across the table and lightly chucked him under the chin. “Oh, my Jeremy, you watch too much Doctor Who.”

The flirting was more than welcome.

“You know what this place is?” He pointed around them at the pub—the dark wainscoting, the ivory-yellow walls covered in pictures and plaques.

“A…pub?”

“Not just a pub. It’s the pub where C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien used to fight about their imaginary worlds,” he said. “They had a writers’ club that met here, the Inklings.”

“I’ve never read them. I like books by girls.” She smiled defiantly, as if daring him to tell her she should read them. He didn’t.

“Just made me think of Narnia,” he said. “Imagine you’re looking for a shirt in the back of your closet and end up in another universe. Possible?”

She shrugged elegantly. “No evidence of it, but…why not? We thought Einstein was mad when his theories said there were regions of space so dense they collapsed into themselves and formed black holes. Now we’ve found them. Could there be other dimensions? A multiverse? I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“So there might be another universe where I stayed at my table instead of coming over to yours,” he said, pointing to a now-empty table across the room.

“Precisely.”

“Which do you like better? That universe or this one?”

“This one,” she said with a smile. “By a light-year.”

That was a good answer.

One night in bed, he asked her, “Are wormholes real?”

“Jeremy, this is your pillow talk?” He loved the way his name sounded in her accent. He called her Chi-Chi, which she found equally charming.

“Just looking for an emergency escape route,” he said, happy to be where he was for once.

They were in her flat, her bed. He liked sleeping at her place. And it made his mother deliriously happy that he was finally dating someone she was allowed to meet.

“Wormholes…it depends.”

“On what?” He expected Chi to say something about math or GTR, which is how cosmologists, he’d learned, casually refer to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

“Depends on whether the universe is infinite.”

“Let’s say it isn’t.”

“Very well,” she said in a crisp tone. This was her tutoring voice. “In a finite universe, it’s impossible anything should exist.”

“Anything?”

“The world. The universe. You. Me. Us. The likelihood of life existing, thriving, and then developing consciousness? Infinitesimal. So infinitesimal, this world is statistically impossible. Yet”—she fluttered her hands as if the world were a prize on a game show—“here we are.”

“But if the universe is infinite?”

“Then yes. Yes to everything. Infinite universe equals infinite outcomes.”

“Unicorns?”

“Yes?”

“Dragons?”

“Yes, yes!”