Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together—one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.

I’m fascinated by the multiverse theory, the idea that there are parallel worlds. Whenever something bad happens, I immediately think, what if? What if this one little thing had been different, what if I’d left the house one minute later, what if I’d decided to go to eat in instead of going out to a restaurant? I think many people do this when bad things happen, and it’s only natural that the characters in Miracle Creek would do this after the explosion. They wonder what their lives would be like today if they’d made one different decision—something that seemed insignificant at the time but might have resulted in one less death, or maybe no explosion or fire at all. I’ve seen this passage more than any other passage in reviews and social media posts. It’s one of my favorite passages, and I’m happy it’s resonated with so many readers.