Mark Gagnon

Goes into another bookstore, they don't have it.

And he goes to another, they still don't have it.

So he decides to go home, and on his way home, he sits down on a bench at a train station and notices a book sitting right there, abandoned.

And it was The Girl from Petrovka.

How strange.

It's the copy of the book that he was looking for just sitting there abandoned.

And then later, when Hopkins actually meets the author, George Pfeiffer, he tells him this story, that he found a book sitting at the train station.

And the author mentioned that he didn't have his own copy name.

He actually lent his last one, heavily annotated with personal notes in the margins, to a friend, and that friend had lost it somewhere in London.

Anthony Hopkins checked the copy, and the copy that he found on the bench was actually George Pfeiffer's personal annotated copy.

I mean, what are the odds?

What do you call that?

If you're religious, you might call it a miracle, or at least maybe a sign from God.

If you're into psychology, you might call it a synchronicity.

And if you're a statistician, you'd probably say, well, there's 8 billion people walking around this planet.

Weird stuff is supposed to happen.

It's just statistical math.

The same event, three completely different interpretations.

And one impossible question at the center of it all.

Are miracles, synchronicities, and coincidences actually different things?