What the Palm Knows

The coaxial cable lay tangled across Emma's floor like a dead snake, a relic of the previous tenant's abandoned life. She'd been meaning to call the cable company for three months, but some wounds you don't touch. Some messes you leave alone.

Then came the knock at her door.

"Ma'am? Here to disconnect the service."

His hair was the first thing she noticed—thinning at the crown, the same sandy-brown it had been fifteen years ago. David. The name surfaced like a bubble in her throat, but she swallowed it down.

"Go ahead," she said, and something in his eyes flickered with recognition, too.

He worked in silence, kneeling on her hardwood floor. Emma watched his hands—the knuckles slightly swollen now, the fingernails bitten to the quick. She remembered those hands. Remembered how they'd felt on her waist, how they'd traced the lifeline on her palm that drunken night they'd laughed about palmistry and whether their future was written or just something they'd have to invent.

"You know," David said, not looking up from the cable he was coiling, "I read somewhere that palm lines change every few years. Your fate isn't permanent."

Emma felt something tight loosen in her chest. "You still reading palms?"

He glanced up, and for a moment they were twenty-five again, standing in his apartment that smelled like coffee and ambition, talking about the life they'd build together. Before he chose the corporate track and she chose the artist's uncertain path. Before their choices became walls they couldn't climb.

"Only if you want me to." He stood, cable in hand. "Your service is disconnected, ma'am. Have a good—"

"David."

He stopped at her door, hand on the frame. The cable dangled from his other hand, black and useless without connection.

"Coffee?" she asked. "For old times'?

He looked at his palm, then at hers. Maybe the lines had changed. Maybe some futures weren't written in permanent ink after all.

"I've got twenty minutes," he said, and Emma found herself smiling for what felt like the first time in years.