Palm Reading at 3 AM

The fluorescent lights of the office hummed at a frequency that made Elena's teeth ache. At 3 AM, the twenty-third floor felt less like a workplace and more like a purgatory for the ambitious. She'd been here for fourteen hours, her vision blurring as she stared at spreadsheets that had ceased to make sense around hour ten.

"You look like shit," said Marcus, dropping into the chair across from her. He offered her a palm—his own, not a gesture of peace. The lines were deep, etched with what the fortune teller at his sister's bachelorette party had called "the burden of expectation." He'd laughed then. He wasn't laughing now.

Elena pressed her own palm against his, feeling the warmth, the pulse, the terrifyingly human contact that corporate life tried so hard to eliminate. "Remember when we thought this was worth it?"

"When we were twenty-two and stupid?" Marcus's fingers intertwined with hers. "When we thought working eighty hours a week would make us feel alive instead of... this."

"Zombies," Elena said. "That's what we are. Walking corpses in designer suits, pretending to care about Q3 projections while our marriages dissolve and our muscles atrophy."

The irony wasn't lost on her—she was bearing the burden of a project that would make three executives wealthy while she couldn't remember the last time she'd felt genuine joy. The palm reader had been right about Marcus. She'd said: "You bear the weight of worlds you'll never see."

Outside, the city skyline twinkled with the million other little corporate deaths happening simultaneously. Marcus squeezed her hand, and for a moment, Elena imagined biting him—hard, drawing blood, something raw and real to remind them they weren't dead yet.

Instead she said, "My lease is up next month. I was thinking of moving to that coastal town with all the palm trees. The one where your sister got married."

Marcus looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in months. "You hate beaches."

"I hate spreadsheets more."

"Then let's go," he said. "Let's be alive somewhere else."

The documents waited, patient as graves. But for the first time in years, Elena didn't care.