The Palm Reader

The resort pool at dusk was empty except for us—me doing laps, Elena sunbathing with a martini she'd barely touched. We'd been married seventeen years, and I'd become fluent in the micro-expressions that hid her infidelities. I was swimming, really swimming, cutting through the water with the precision of a man trying to outpace his own suspicions.

That's when I saw him—twenty years old, easy, with the loose grace of someone who'd never been disappointed by life. He approached her chair, and I watched from underwater, a one-man surveillance operation in a chlorine sea. I'd become a spy in my own marriage, gathering intelligence I didn't want, compiling evidence I couldn't use.

When I surfaced, they were laughing. She touched his arm, her palm leaving a wet print on his skin like a stamp of ownership.

Later, in our room, she caught me staring at her hands. 'What?' she asked, and I should have said something—anything—but instead I took her palm in mine and traced the lines like a fortune teller who's lost faith in prophecy. 'This line,' I said, 'it says you'll meet a stranger.' She laughed, but her eyes didn't. 'This line,' I continued, 'it says you'll leave everything behind.'

'Stop,' she whispered, but she didn't pull away. Outside, the wind moved through the palm trees like a secret being passed from one to another.

'This line,' I said finally, my voice breaking, 'it says you already have.'

She wept then, not for me, but for the woman she'd been before—before the hotel bars and strange rooms and the way desire could hollow you out like a coconut, leaving nothing but the hard shell of who you used to be. We lay together that night, a desert between us in the king-sized bed, and I understood then what the palm reader in Tijuana had meant when she told me, 'You already know everything. You just haven't accepted it yet.'

The next morning, I went swimming alone. The water was cold and clear, and for the first time in years, I could see the bottom.