Palm readings at the wedding

The margarita was sweating in Elena's hand, condensation dripping onto the resort napkin like the tears she'd refused to shed at her sister's rehearsal dinner. She was forty-three, freshly divorced, and sitting alone at the swim-up bar while a wedding party she barely knew splashed around her in the chlorinated water.

"You look like someone who needs her fortune told."

Elena turned to find a woman with silver-streaked hair and lined eyes extending her hand, palm up. The woman had the kind of face that suggested she'd seen everything and forgotten nothing. "I used to read palms in the Village, before I moved to paradise."

Elena laughed, the sound rusty in her throat. "My palm? My life line's probably shorter than this cocktail straw."

"Humor me."

Against her better judgment—against the voice that sounded like her mother saying don't encourage strangers—Elena extended her hand. The woman's fingers were warm and calloused, tracing the lines on her palm like she was reading braille.

"You're swimming upstream," the woman said quietly. "But you're almost to still water."

Elena's throat tightened. She'd spent three years swimming upstream, fighting currents of debt and loneliness after Mark left. The only thing that had kept her going was Buster, her ancient Labrador who'd curled against her every night during the divorce. When Buster died two months ago, something in her had simply stopped swimming.

"The dog," the woman said, surprising her. "I see him here." She tapped Elena's palm. "He's waiting. They always wait."

Elena couldn't breathe. She wanted to pull away, wanted to call this woman a fraud, wanted to believe in something she'd stopped believing in at twelve when her father died. But her hand stayed in the woman's grip, trembling like the resort palm trees in the evening breeze.

"Your heart line," the woman said, "it's healing over something old. But it branches, see? New paths."

Around them, the wedding guests were doing cannonballs and drunk-shout-laughing, young and oblivious and swimming through life like the water would always hold them. Elena watched them and thought about how she'd been dog-paddling for years, exhausted and going nowhere.

"So," the woman released her hand with a knowing smile. "What'll it be? Another round, or are you ready to get back in the water?"

Elena looked at her palm, at the lines that supposedly held her future, then at the turquoise water stretching toward the horizon. She thought about Buster waiting somewhere, about the years she'd spent treading water instead of learning to swim, about how forty-three wasn't the end of anything except the things she'd already survived.

She slid off the barstool and lowered herself into the pool, the cool water shocking her skin like a second baptism. When she surfaced, the woman raised her glass in a toast, and for the first time in three years, Elena didn't feel like she was drowning.