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• Archive: "He says you'll never be hurt as much by being open as you have been by remaining closed."The messenger is a school janitor with a master's in art history who claims to be channeling "from both sides of the veil." "He" is Adam, a three-year-old who has never spoken an intelligible word.
• And the message is intended for Martha Beck, Adam's mother, who doesn't know whether to make a mad dash for the door to escape a raving lunatic (after all, how many conversations like this one can you have before you stop getting dinner party invitations and start pushing a mop yourself?) or accept another in a series of life lessons from an impeccable but mysterious source.From the moment Martha and her husband, John, accidentally conceived their second child, all hell broke loose.
• They were a couple obsessed with success.
• After years of matching IQs and test scores with less driven peers, they had two Harvard degrees apiece and were gunning for more.
• They'd plotted out a future in the most vaunted ivory tower of academe.