The Last Palm Reading

Margot hadn't spoken to her sister in eight years, not since the wedding where Marie had foxed her way into the bridegroom's bed and then, somehow, into his heart. Now Marie lay in a hospice bed, her liver failing at thirty-nine, and Margot found herself sitting beside her with nothing left to say but everything she needed to forgive.

Marie's hand lay limp on the white blanket. Margot took it, pressed her thumb into the center of her sister's palm. Their grandmother had taught them both palm reading during a seaside summer when they were girls - before competition over boys, before the betrayals that piled up like debris between them.

"Remember how she'd say that if you couldn't bear to look at your own lifeline, you were probably lying to yourself about who you were?" Margot said quietly.

Marie's eyes opened, cloudy but aware. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

Margot traced the life line that crossed her sister's palm - shorter than she remembered. "I always hated that you were better at this than me. You always knew what people wanted before they did."

"That's not magic," Marie whispered. "That's just paying attention."

"And using it."

"Yes. That too."

A bear of a man, their father, had taught them that everything worth having required taking from someone else. He'd bankrupted his business partner, then his second wife, then died owing everyone. Marie had learned the lesson too well. Margot had spent her adult life trying to unlearn it.

"You could have told me about the cancer six months ago," Margot said. "I would have... I don't know. Helped."

"You're helping now."

"Only because you're dying."

Marie's fingers curled around Margot's hand, pressing their palms together. "The same difference."

Outside, a fox crossed the lawn - a real one, russet and quick, threading through the gap in the hedge where the fence had rotted through. Margot watched it vanish into the neighbor's yard, sleek and surviving, as their kind always did.

"Grandmother said you could see a whole life in a hand," Margot said, not looking down. "But all I see is wasted time."

"That's because you're looking for yours," Marie said, her voice thin but steady. "Read mine instead. What do you see?"

Margot looked at the palm beneath hers - the creases and lines, the small scar from a kitchen accident, the faint tremor that hadn't been there before. She saw the choices her sister had made, the people she'd hurt, the way she'd patterned their father's ruthlessness without understanding the cost until it came due.

She saw, finally, that Marie had never learned how to stop running. Only how to run faster.

"I see someone who was lonely," Margot said. "Even when she won."