Skya said purposely forgetting a shirt and then sleeping in said shirt for a week counted as two embarrassing confessions. Rafe said, “Well, damn,” then missed his next wicket to even things out.
After that, they all started missing their shots on purpose. Jeremy. Rafe. Skya.
Jeremy’s secret—he’d been in love with Rafe from the moment he saw him.
Rafe’s secret—he hadn’t been in love with Jeremy from the moment he saw him. It had taken more time, like a painting he wanted to get just right. He couldn’t rush it. But the day he started to fall—before he even knew he was falling—had to have been the first time he sat in on Jeremy practicing piano. Why else would he sit there thinking he never wanted to be anywhere else with anyone but Jeremy?
And Queen Skya told them her secret that night, that as much as she loved Shanandoah, she’d often thought of leaving it to find the lost princess. Her mother, who’d given birth to her at fourteen, had brought home a new baby when Skya was ten. A little girl with lungs like an opera diva. But her mother had gotten flakey again and started disappearing for days at a time. Her aunt Marie, who had taken Skya in, said she couldn’t handle another child, and her sister was given up for adoption. For one beautiful month, Skya had a sister.
But she hadn’t gone back for the simple reason that she was afraid to. This was her kingdom, after all. It needed her more than her sister did, didn’t it?
Or did it?
That night they had a slumber party, piling like a litter of exhausted puppies onto the queen’s silken pillows. They’d crossed the border into the hidden country of each other’s hearts, and they couldn’t bear to leave again.
Jeremy wiped tears from his face. Coming home to see Rafe was a massive mistake. Obviously, Rafe was suffering, but Jeremy could do nothing about it. In Shanandoah, Rafe had made Jeremy promise not to tell him anything so they could go back someday. Jeremy’s loyalty was to the boy even if his love was for the man in paint-splattered clothes who didn’t notice him sitting twenty feet away.
It was the last time Jeremy let himself try to see Rafe.
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.”
