I remember when I was younger, my family lived in this little grey cottage on a 50-acre estate in Dover Massachusetts. At the time, my parents were scarcely older than I am now, and didn’t have much money, so they worked as caretakers on the estate to subsidize rent. My sister and I, we saw this place as a never ending fantasy land: fields of buttercups, forests...

“What you need to do is defy any obvious logic,” my dad says to my moms husband on Christmas morning. They’re discussing the password for Tom’s new email account, but they’re talking on opposite sites of the universe. You see, my dad is an IT specialist and Tom still uses a Charter.net email address, whatever that is. It’s a real...