True Believer by Nicholas Sparks Page B

easy to read.”
“So what am I thinking?”
Doris hesitated. “Well, like I said, my gifts are different than my mother’s. She could read you like a book. And besides, I don’t want to scare you.”
“Go ahead. Scare me.”
“All right,” she said. She took a long look at him. “Think of something I couldn’t possibly know. And remember, my gift isn’t reading minds. I just get . . . hints now and then, and only if they’re really strong feelings.”
“All right,” Jeremy said, playing along. “You do realize, however, that you’re hedging yourself here.”
“Oh, hush, now.” Doris reached for his hands. “Let me hold these, okay?”
Jeremy nodded. “Sure.”
“Now think of something personal I couldn’t possibly know.”
“Okay.”
She squeezed his hand. “Seriously. Right now you’re just playing with me.”
“Fine,” he said, “I’ll think of something.”
Jeremy closed his eyes. He thought of the reason Maria had finally left him, and for a long moment, Doris said nothing at all. Instead, she simply looked at him, as if trying to get him to say something.
He’d been through this before. Countless times. He knew enough to say nothing, and when she remained silent, he knew he had her. She suddenly jerked—unsurprising, Jeremy thought, since it went with the show—and immediately afterward, released his hands.
Jeremy opened his eyes and looked at her.
“And?”
Doris was looking at him strangely. “Nothing,” she said.
“Ah,” Jeremy added, “I guess it’s not in the cards today, huh?”
“Like I said, I’m a diviner.” She smiled, almost as if in apology. “But I can definitely say that you’re not pregnant.”
He chuckled. “I’d have to say that you’re right about that.”
She smiled at him before glancing toward the table. She brought her eyes up again. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done what I did. It was inappropriate.”
“No big deal,” he said, meaning it.
“No,” she insisted. She met his eyes and reached for his hand again. She squeezed it softly. “I’m very sorry.”
Jeremy wasn’t quite sure how to react when she took his hand again, but he was struck by the compassion in her expression.
And Jeremy had the unnerving feeling that she had guessed more about his personal history than she could possibly know.
Psychic abilities, premonitions, and intuition are simply a product of the interplay among experience, common sense, and accumulated knowledge. Most people greatly underestimate the amount of information they learn in a lifetime, and the human brain is able to instantly correlate the information in a way that no other species—or machine—is capable of doing.
The brain, however, learns to discard the vast majority of information it receives, since, for obvious reasons, it’s not critical to remember everything. Of course, some people have better memories than others, a fact that often displays itself in testing scenarios, and the ability to train memories is well documented. But even the worst of students remember 99.99 percent of everything they come across in life. Yet, it’s that 0.01 percent that most frequently distinguishes one person from the next. For some people, it manifests itself in the ability to memorize trivia, or excel as doctors, or accurately interpret financial data as a hedge-fund billionaire. For other people, it’s an ability to read others, and those people—with an innate ability to draw on memories, common sense, and experience and to codify it quickly and accurately—manifest an ability that strikes others as being supernatural.
But what Doris did was . . . beyond that somehow, Jeremy thought. She knew. Or at least, that was Jeremy’s first inclination, until he retreated to the logical explanation of what had happened.
And, in fact, nothing had really happened, he reminded himself. Doris hadn’t said anything; it was simply the way she looked at him that made him think she understood those unknowable things. And