In the Before, humankind is created with a hole in its heart, the designers not realizing their mistake—if it was a mistake—until too late. Elliot Chance is just a boy and knows nothing of this. All he knows is that he doesn’t feel at home in this world. His father is stoic, his mother pragmatic, and his brother different from him in almost every way. As Elliot grows into adult-hood, where the turbulence of life seems to offer no cure for the emptiness, his desire for escape grows only more urgent. Desperate and lost, he stumbles upon a support group on the edge of Manhattan. There he meets two other drifting souls—Sasha, a young woman who leaves coded messages in the copy that she writes for advertising campaigns, and Bannor, whose detailed depictions of the future make Elliot think that this would-be time traveler may have actually been there. With these two unlikely allies, Elliot launches into the business of life, determined to be happy in spite of himself. He lands a good job, finds a dynamic girlfriend, and develops an ambitious business idea for the dot-com boom, confident that everything is proceeding according to plan. Yet the hole in the heart is not so easily filled.