The Palm Reader's Cable

Margot traced the lifeline on Elias's **palm**, her finger hovering over that dried-up riverbed of fate. The ceiling fan whirred above them, barely stirring the humid air of their apartment while a **cat** — something tortoiseshell and half-feral that had adopted them six months into their marriage — watched from the windowsill.

"You're going to leave me," she said, not as a question. The **cable** news droned in the background, some catastrophe in a country they'd never visit, scroll of tragedy ticking beneath breathless commentary.

Elias didn't pull his hand away. That was the problem — he never did anymore. He just let things happen to him, let Margot plan the weekends, let his mother arrange their holiday visits, let himself be promoted into a corner office where he spent ten hours a day feeling like a corporate **zombie**, animated only by coffee and the creeping fear that this was it, this was everything.

"There's someone at work," Elias said finally. The admission hung between them, heavier than the Miami heat. "She's sharp. Clever. A **fox**, Margot. The way she operates — she sees angles nobody else sees."

Margot laughed, the sound sharp and jagged. "You're leaving me for a management consultant named after a woodland creature?"

"I'm not leaving because of her," Elias said, finally pulling his hand away. "I'm leaving because of us. Because I look at you across the dinner table and I don't know who you are anymore. Because we've been dead for three years and neither of us had the decency to bury the body."

The cat jumped from the sill, tail twitching. Margot looked at the empty space where Elias's hand had been, at the lifeline she'd been reading like tea leaves, as if any of it meant anything at all.

"Your palm," she said. "I forgot to tell you what the lifeline meant."

"What?"

"It means you're still alive," she said. "For whatever that's worth."