Palm-Read at Dusk

Maya hadn't seen Eli in three years, not since his breakdown and subsequent transformation into someone she barely recognized. He'd shown up at her door looking like a corpse — gaunt, eyes hollowed out by whatever cocktail of medications he was taking, moving through life with the jerky, disconnected motions of the dead. A zombie, she'd thought, watching him navigate her living room. The word had tasted cruel in her mouth.

Now they sat on the deck of a beachside bar in Mexico, nursing overpriced cocktails while palm fronds rustled above them like dry laughter. The ocean stretched dark and endless beyond the railing.

"You're still doing it," Eli said, not looking at her. "That thing where you present as functional but something inside is screaming."

Maya swirled the watery remains of her drink. "I'm fine, Eli. The promotion came through. I bought the condo."

"You're drowning, Maya. I can see it in the way you hold yourself. Like you're underwater and everyone else is breathing air."

He reached across the table and took her hand, flipping it palm-up. His fingers traced the lines there with clinical precision. "I started reading palms in rehab," he said quietly. "Something to do with my hands besides shaking."

"This is ridiculous."

"Your life line is strong but interrupted."

She tried to pull away. He held firm, not roughly, but with the insistence of someone who'd already lost everything and had nothing left to fear.

"You think you're the only one," he said. "You think the world chewed you up and spit you out and now you have to perform happiness because that's what adults do. But look around you." He gestured to the bar, filled with tourists laughing too loud, drinking too much. "We're all just varying degrees of haunted. The difference is, I stopped pretending."

"You gave up," she said, and the accusation came out thinner than she intended.

"I stopped. There's a difference."

He released her hand. "You can be my friend again, or you can be the person who remembers who I used to be. But you can't be both. That version of me is gone, Maya."

The waiter brought another round. Maya watched the condensation bead on the glass, felt the salt air drying on her skin. Somewhere behind them, someone laughed — bright, genuine, alive.

"Teach me," she said, the words barely audible above the waves. "How to stop."

Eli finally smiled, and it was small and sad and absolutely nothing like his old smile at all. "Start by admitting you're already drowning."