The Last Palm Reader

The air conditioning in Marcus's office had died three days ago. His palms stuck to the desk as he typed, leaving damp prints on the quarterly report he'd been avoiding for weeks. At fifty-two, he should have been better at this game—the corporate charade, the PowerPoint theater, the way everyone pretended their hair wasn't thinning and their marriages weren't quiet wars fought across kitchen tables.

"You still seeing that woman?" Eleanor asked from the doorway. She was trimming the spider plant that had overtaken her cubicle, its dangling shoots like the thoughts she couldn't quite articulate anymore.

Marcus's hand went to his temple, where gray now outnumbered brown at an alarming rate. "I told you. She reads palms. It's not like that."

"She tells you what you want to hear. They all do." She snipped a leaf. "My mother saw one in Miami, 1985. The woman told her she'd meet a dark stranger. Two weeks later, her purse was stolen by a Cuban kid with black hair. Fate is just coincidence with better branding."

Marcus didn't mention that the palm reader had traced the line on his hand and whispered: *You're not going to die in that cubicle, but you're going to die waiting.* She'd smelled like incense and something green—basil, maybe, or mint. He'd gone home and cooked spinach for the first time in twenty years, remembering how his grandmother made it with garlic and olive oil, the way it wilted into something tender and dark, how she'd said *Eat this, you'll live forever.*

She'd died at sixty-two.

"What did she tell you?" Eleanor asked, and he realized she'd moved closer. Her hand touched his shoulder, her fingers grazing the hair at the back of his neck. He hadn't been touched like that in seven years.

Marcus turned. The air between them felt charged, electric with possibility. Or maybe it was just the heat.

"She said I have a choice," he heard himself say. "And that I haven't made it yet."

Eleanor's palm slid down to his hand, her skin against his, and he felt something like fear, or maybe it was just the beginning of everything he'd been too afraid to want.