What the Lines Said

The receptionist's palm was warm, soft—disarmingly so for a woman who'd just threatened to burn the entire department to the ground. Elena traced the life line with her thumb, feeling the subtle tremor in Sophia's hand.

"You're running from something," Elena said, not looking up from the hand cradled in hers. "Not toward. Always away."

Sophia laughed, sharp and brittle. "Now you're a psychic? I thought you were just the corporate events girl they hired to palm-read at the holiday party."

"I'm observant. Your head line—it's fragmented. Like you can't commit to a single thought, a single path."

"Maybe I'm just complex." Sophia pulled her hand back, but not quickly enough to hide the lightning strike of pain across her face. "Unlike you. Straight as an arrow, marching toward that corner office like it's the promised land."

Elena had wanted that office for seven years. Had slept on the couch of her open-plan apartment more times than she'd slept in her bed. Had missed her sister's wedding, her mother's sixtieth birthday, every chance at something resembling a life beyond these glass walls. And here was Sophia, twenty-six years old with a trust fund and a conscience that apparently extended only as far as her next manicure, telling her about complexity.

"The thunder line," Elena said, surprised by how steady her voice was. "Yours is crossed with the fate line. Means you'll face a choice soon. Stay or go."

"Go where?"

"Anywhere but here."

Outside, the first real storm of autumn broke—window-rattling thunder, lightning that flickered like a strobe light through the floor-to-ceiling glass. For a moment, they were just two women illuminated by flashes of white, caught in the electrical tension of something that had been building for months.

"You really see all that in my palm?" Sophia asked, something like hope warring with cynicism in her voice.

"I see what you let me see."

"And what do you see in yours?"

Elena looked at her own hand then—at the lines she'd memorized, the paths she'd chosen, the compromises she'd made until they became invisible. She thought about the email draft sitting in her inbox, the resignation letter she'd written and rewritten for weeks.

"I see," Elena said, "that I'm done running."