In the Night Wood. Dale Bailey

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      Her name was Erin, her secret unexpected (to say the least).

      Coincidence, Charles called it. Coincidence that he had plucked down that book in his grandfather’s library (she dismissed it all as chance). Coincidence that he had gone on to seek a Ph.D. in English. Coincidence that on a late night in the library with snow slanting out of the black February sky, he should run (literally) into the great-great-exponentially-great-something-or-other of Caedmon Hollow himself, who might have influenced, in subtle ways, Charles’s pathway to this place.

      Fate, he thought. The Worm Ouroboros. The snake biting its own tail. He had come full circle. And for a moment Charles glimpsed a vast, secret world, intersecting lines of power running just beyond the limits of human perception — a great story in which they were all of them embedded, moving toward some unimaginable conclusion.

      As secrets go, it wasn’t much of one, Erin confided. The branch of the family that had immigrated to America had generations ago fallen out of touch with the family that remained behind in England — there might have been some kind of conflict, a formal break. She didn’t know, or much care. But Caedmon Hollow had remained with them, as a legend if nothing more: an eccentric figure out of the distant past, who’d squandered much of his abbreviated life in drinking and debauchery, squandering as well the talent that had enabled him to eke out but a single volume of fiction.

      “Everyone in the family reads it at some time or other. It’s like a ritual,” she said. “It’s not really a story for children, is it? It’s hardly a story at all, more like the ravings of a man half mad from drinking.”

      “I suppose it is,” he said, recalling the strangely vivid nightmares his own reading had produced. “But it has a kind of power, doesn’t it?”

      “I guess so. I haven’t forgotten it, anyway.”

      “Is there more, do you think? Unpublished?”

      “Methinks I hear your grad-student heart beat harder,” she said. “On the hunt for a dissertation topic, are we?” And when he blushed — he could feel the heat creeping up his face — she touched his hand, and he flushed still harder. “Teasing,” she said. “You can have my crazy old great-great-whatever. It hardly matters to me.”

      So it began, their introduction to the fuel that love feeds upon: stories.

      That night they shared their stories — the beginning of them, anyway, as they understood them then. They started at the surface as the best stories do. So they talked about their graduate studies (their gradual studies, he said, venturing a rare joke). They talked about their crummy apartments and their crummier cars. He talked about the pressure to publish. She talked about the Law Review.

      And then, as the best stories do, they deepened.

      They talked. She was an orphan, alone in the world. Her parents had died in a car accident three years ago. In a way, Charles was an orphan, too. Kit had hardly been a mother to him, and in his freshman year of college she’d moved to a commune in Nova Scotia. He hadn’t seen her since.

      Dreams and aspirations, two cups of coffee, then three. They were both too wired to sleep, so they repaired to her apartment to talk some more. She checked his head to make sure he hadn’t injured himself when they’d collided, his lips brushed hers, and one thing led to another, as these things will.

      Everything important that had ever happened to him had happened in libraries, Charles thought, drawing her down to him on the bed. Then he stopped thinking at all. They married six months later.

      They lived happily ever after.