What the Lines Hold

The sign said MADAME ZORA, but the woman inside looked more like someone's grandmother, with silver hair pulled back in a loose bun and eyes that had probably seen everything twice.

"Don't be shy," she said, and Elena extended her palm, feeling ridiculous. She was thirty-four, a corporate attorney who didn't believe in anything she couldn't bill for. But her mother had sworn by this place, and Elena was here because she'd caught her husband with his assistant and didn't know how to ask the questions that were eating her alive.

"You're thinking about leaving," the old woman said, tracing the life line with a calloused finger. "But you're also thinking about staying. That's the trouble with choices—they feel permanent until you make them, then suddenly they're just facts."

Elena's throat tightened. She'd worn her best hat—the wide-brimmed one she'd bought for a funeral three years ago—hoping it would make her look like someone who had things under control. Now she just felt like a woman hiding.

"He's not going to change," Madame Zora said, not looking up. "But neither are you. That's the part you haven't figured out yet." She patted Elena's hand. "You think you're waiting for him to become someone else. What you're really waiting for is permission to become yourself."

The bell above the door chimed. Another customer. Elena pulled her hand back, suddenly cold. She'd come here looking for certainty, a sign from the universe that would make the decision for her. Instead, she'd found something worse: the truth that she already knew.

Outside, the wind caught the brim of her hat, nearly stealing it. She held it down with both hands and started walking toward the train station, toward the apartment that was half-packed boxes and unanswered questions, toward a life she'd have to build herself or not at all.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Him again. She let it ring.

The palm reader had said nothing about what would happen next. Just that she would have to choose it.