The first time I met up with the astrologer Chani Nicholas in Los Angeles, in December, it was for a lunch interview. We sipped our drinks and chewed truffle French fries; I asked questions and she answered them. The conversation flowed easily. We laughed a lot.

It was a good interview, by all accounts, but it went slightly sideways in a way I had never experienced.

After I had turned off my recorder and paid the bill and packed my things and arranged for my exit, she turned the tables on me. “I looked at your chart again,” she said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Ms. Nicholas, like my mother, my crush and the D.M.V., knows the exact date, time and place of my birth. We had met twice before: at the brunch of a mutual friend, where I gave her this information, raw from a breakup and looking for any kind of salve, and then, briefly, at a coffee shop to talk about it.