The Palm Reader's Cat

Elena was running late again. The quarterly review was in twenty minutes, and she'd already polished her lie about why the Singapore merger had stalled. The client wouldn't care about supply chain disruptions—they only cared that their stock options were bleeding out.

She ducked into the alley behind the office tower to catch her breath. That's when she saw it—a mangy calico cat sitting beside a folding table covered in crushed velvet. An old woman with piercings up both ears looked up from her tarot deck.

"You have running away energy," the woman said. "Forty for a reading."

Elena laughed. "I don't believe in that stuff."

"The cat doesn't either. Still shows up every day." The cat blinked, then rubbed against Elena's stocking, leaving snags and gray hairs. "Your palm says you're tired of being the person everyone else needs you to be."

Something in Elena's chest cracked open. She'd spent fifteen years becoming exactly what her parents, her boss, her ex-husband had wanted. Efficient. Reliable. Empty.

The old woman took Elena's palm, tracing lines with a nicotine-stained finger. "You're at a crossroads. One path looks like the life you have. The other..." She shrugged. "The other doesn't look like anything, because you've never let yourself imagine it."

Her watch buzzed. The review. The merger. The life she'd built like a careful fortress.

Elena looked at the cat, now cleaning itself with elaborate indifference. It didn't owe anyone anything.

"Can you really see the future?" Elena asked.

"I see patterns." The woman closed Elena's palm, pressing it gently between both hands. "The question isn't what I see. It's what you're finally willing to look at."

The review started without her. Elena sat on the folding table's folding chair instead, watching the cat chase a sunbeam across the pavement. For the first time in years, she wasn't running anywhere at all.