What the Lines Don't Say

The bottle of **vitamin** D supplements sat on the nightstand, a graveyard of good intentions. Maya had started taking them after the miscarriage, back when she still believed in the restorative power of small rituals. Now they were just another object in the room where we'd stopped speaking.

I watched her sleep, her **palm** open toward me like an offering I didn't know how to accept. In the blue light from her phone—charging now, finally dead after three days of my messages going unanswered—I imagined I could read the lines there. Life line truncated. Heart line fractured. Head line running off into nothing.

I'd spent the afternoon in a waiting room at a naturopathic clinic, surrounded by women seeking answers from charlatans who'd trace the lifeline on their palm and promise: Five more years. Ten. Love comes in spring. The irony wasn't lost on me—science had failed us, so I'd turned to the same desperate magic.

Her **iPhone** lit up. The vibration against the wood was like a heartbeat returning.

I shouldn't have looked. But grief makes thieves of us all. The message preview glowed in the darkness: *Can you meet me? Same place.*

The sender was someone I didn't know. A name, a number, a question mark where there should have been answers.

Maya stirred. Her fingers curled inward, palm closing. The moment passed.

I lay back beside her, the supplements between us like a wall. In the morning, I'd pretend I hadn't seen. In the morning, I'd ask about her day, and she'd tell me it was fine, and we'd both be lying, and that would be its own kind of ritual.

Some lines you can't read until they've already broken you.