Juan tried to keep the excitement from his voice. “Absolutely.” He’d figured his time with Kathy was at its end, and he would have taken any excuse to prolong the evening.

Kathy led the way outside.

Juan was amazed at how successfully the riverside location had been transformed into what looked like a tropical paradise. The sounds of crickets and birds surrounded them as they strolled along palm tree-lined paths dotted with the occasional torch. He looked for the speakers he knew must be piping in those sounds, but they’d done a good job of hiding them.

“This place is amazing,” he said.

Kathy breathed in deeply and nodded. For a second, Juan thought he saw a pained expression flash across her face.

“So…” she said. “Maybe you could tell me more about what you’re doing now in your research?”

“I’d love to. Frankly, I’m kind of excited by it.” Juan motioned toward a well-lit alcove with a bench hewn from a log. “Let’s sit and enjoy the breeze.”

Kathy sat in the middle of the six-foot-wide bench, and as Juan sat, she twisted in place so she faced him.

He drank in the image of this beautiful girl and felt nervous once more.

“Before I say anything,” he said, “I just have to ask you to keep this to yourself. We haven’t yet announced the details of some of my work and—”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m pretty good at keeping secrets.”

Juan nodded. “Well, it started with me trying to figure out how multiple copies of a certain gene showed up in modern-day elephants…”

###

To Juan’s surprise, Kathy seemed sincerely fascinated as he explained everything he’d been working on. She even asked very probing questions. This woman was as smart as she was beautiful.

“So,” Kathy asked, “the pattern you found, it really was accurate for other animals?”

“Yup. I was kind of shocked, myself. It took a lot of tweaking because some of my data had come from partially damaged DNA samples, but in the end, it was like I’d found a key to a puzzle. The same basic pattern appeared across species.”

Kathy hesitated, then asked: “Do you believe in God?”

Juan’s eyes opened wider as the unexpected question registered, and he paused, giving the question serious consideration. “I do. In fact, I grew up Catholic, though I’d be lying if I said I’d been in church recently. Not since my mom died.”

“Well, have you ever thought that you might have found a pattern that God had put into all animals? How else can the universality of this pattern be explained?”