Palm Lines in the Break Room

The fluorescent lights hummed their usual noon frequency as Mara traced the lifeline on her left palm. She'd been doing that a lot lately — since the funeral, since the hospital, since she'd stopped sleeping properly.

"You're going to give yourself wrinkles," said Chen, sliding into the chair across from her. He placed a cold bull on the table. The energy drink can was bright red, aggressive. "Drink this. You look like a zombie."

Mara smiled weakly. Chen was the closest thing she had to a friend in this office of gray cubicles and forgotten dreams. He'd covered her shifts during the worst of it, when grief had been a physical weight she couldn't lift from her chest.

"My grandmother used to read palms," Mara said, not looking at him. "She said the lines change. That your life isn't written in stone."

"And?" Chen cracked open his own drink. "What do yours say?"

She finally looked up. The break room window reflected both of them — tired eyes, rumpled business casual, the invisible stamp of corporate survival on their foreheads. Outside, a cat walked along the windowsill of the building next door, tail flicking with deliberate indifference.

"They say I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be," Mara lied. "That everything happens for a reason."

Chen snorted. "Your grandmother sound like a greeting card."

"She died believing it."

"And now?"

"Now I'm thirty-four, single, and analyzing market trends for a company that doesn't know my name." She ran her thumb over her palm again. "The bull market crashed. My cat ran away three months ago. My best friend — " She stopped. The name still caught in her throat like fishbone.

Chen reached across the table and gently pulled her hand away from her palm, pressing the cold drink into it instead.

"The zombie thing," he said quietly. "That's what grief is. You're walking around with something dead inside you, but you keep moving anyway."

Mara looked at him — really looked. She saw the dark circles under his eyes too, the way his tie was always slightly loosened by 2 PM, the photograph of a woman on his desk that he never talked about.

"Who did you lose?" she asked.

He hesitated, then: "My wife. Last year."

They sat in silence for a long moment. The cat outside paused, pressed its paw against the glass, then continued on.

"Maybe that's the point," Mara said finally. "Maybe the palm lines don't change, but we do. We become people who can carry the dead and keep walking."

Chen smiled, the first genuine smile she'd seen from him. "To becoming," he said, raising his can.

"To becoming," she echoed.

And for the first time in months, the fluorescent lights didn't seem quite so harsh.