Bear Market on the Palm

I found her in a strip mall between a laundromat and a check-cashing place, a neon palm blinking in the window. Madame Vera's. The irony wasn't lost on me—three months ago, I'd have dropped more on lunch than she charged for a reading.

"You've been running a long time," she said, not looking up from my hand. Her fingers were dry, papery against my skin. "Chasing something. Or maybe running from."

I almost laughed. The SEC would call it embezzlement. My ex-wife called it abandonment. I called it a gap year, though I was forty-seven and my gap was more like a crater.

"The bull," she said suddenly, her nail catching on my lifeline. "He's still charging."

I stiffened. Marcus—my former business partner, currently serving eighteen months—had been bullish till the end. Literally. Bull market, bull-headed, bull in a china shop of other people's money. The last time I'd seen him, he'd grabbed my arm, eyes wild, screaming about market corrections and buying opportunities while federal agents cleared out his office.

"He's not your problem anymore," Vera said, interpreting the tension in my fingers. "But you're still running his race."

Outside, Florida rain sheeted against the window. I'd driven sixteen hours straight from Charleston, fueled by vending machine coffee and panic. My offshore accounts were frozen. My passport flagged. What remained of the $12 million I'd siphoned was tucked in a duffel bag in the trunk of a rented sedan.

"What do you see?" I asked, my voice cracking.

She traced my heart line, paused. "A man who's forgotten how to be still."

The palm fronds outside thrashed in the wind. I'd been running for three years—through shell companies in Cayman, through consulting gigs in Dubai, through a marriage I'd hollowed out from the inside.

"What happens when I stop?" I asked.

Vera looked up for the first time. Her eyes were cataract-clouded, seeing everything and nothing.

"That's the real question, isn't it?" She pressed a business card into my palm. "Same time next week?"

I walked out into the rain, my car waiting at the curb. For the first time in three years, I didn't start it immediately. Just sat there, engine cooling, rain drumming against the roof, my palm still tingling where she'd touched it.

Marcus had been the bull, all fury and momentum. I'd just been the one who couldn't stop running from the inevitable.

My phone buzzed. Unknown number.

I turned it off.

The rain kept falling.