The Palm Reader's Commission

Maggie traced the life line on the stranger's palm, her thumbnail catching against his calloused skin. The air in her small apartment smelled of the papaya she'd sliced earlier—sweet, fermenting, somehow melancholy.

"You're going to lose everything," she whispered.

The man—CEO of something or other, she'd stopped listening—laughed. But his eyes didn't crinkle. "That's not what the last one said."

"The last palm reader was on your payroll. I'm not."

She'd been working corporate events for three years since her husband died, since the medical bills piled higher than the grief she couldn't articulate. The pyramid scheme of grief, she called it—each day built on the shaky foundation of the one before, until she was amazed the whole structure hadn't collapsed.

The CEO had come recommended. Said he wanted authenticity. What he wanted was validation.

"The pyramid you've built," Maggie said, closing his fingers back into a fist. "It's going to crush you."

He pulled his hand away. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"I know that line." She gestured to the bowl of papaya on her table, brown spots blooming across its orange flesh like bruises. "I know how things look perfect from the outside while they're rotting from within."

He stood to leave, then paused at the door. "How much do I owe you?"

"Nothing." She turned her own palm upward, studied the lines she'd memorized years ago. "But if you're smart, you'll get out before the foundation gives way."

He didn't. Six months later, she watched his perp walk on the news while eating breakfast. The reporter called it a Ponzi scheme. She knew better—it was just another pyramid, built on the backs of people who believed in something solid.

She finished her papaya, sweet and perfect, and thought about how some things, given enough time, eventually show their true colors.