What the Palm Reader Didn't Say

The conference room air conditioning hummed its melancholy note as Elena pressed her sweating palm against the glass table. She was twenty minutes late to her own performance review, and Marcus—her friend of fifteen years, now her boss—wouldn't meet her eyes.

"You're bearing the weight of the whole department," he said, finally looking up. His temples had grayed since she'd last seen him without his glasses. The hair at his crown thinned like patience worn thin.

Outside, autumn stripped the trees bare. Elena thought about the sphinx moth that had battered itself against her bedroom window three nights running—drawn to light, bewildered by glass, relentless in its beautiful stupidity. She'd been that moth once, years ago, fresh out of grad school and hungry for something she couldn't name.

"The restructure isn't personal," Marcus continued, but Elena heard what he didn't say: you're expensive, you're tired, you're thirty-eight and still dreaming.

That weekend, she drove four hours north to the lakeside cabin where she'd spent her twenties reading philosophy and drinking cheap wine, certain she'd solve life's riddles before thirty. The sphinx posed her question to Oedipus: what walks on four legs, then two, then three? The answer was man—always man. Elena wondered if the riddle itself was the trap.

Her mother had called that morning. "Your father's doctor says the memory loss is bear-related," she'd said, and Elena had laughed before realizing she meant _bearable_ as in bear, not bearing as in carrying, and neither made sense anyway.

She sat on the dock watching her reflection fragment across dark water. A bear had been sighted near the cabins that summer—disoriented, hungry, wandering roads it used to know. The riddle wasn't about changing forms. It was about staying yourself while everything became something else.

Monday morning, she packed her box. Marcus hovered in the doorway, fingers worrying his palm like he might read something there if he pressed hard enough.

"I'll write you a recommendation," he offered.

She thought about the sphinx moth, the bear, her father forgetting the word for things he'd used his whole life. She set her box on the floor and extended her hand.

"No need," she said. "I've already figured out what I'm walking toward."