What the Palm Reader Forgot to Say

The lines on her palm were supposed to tell Elena everything, but the old woman in the dusty shop on 4th Street just kept rubbing her thumb over Elena's life line and shaking her head.

"You're living someone else's life," she said finally.

Elena walked out into the rain, three years of marriage pressing against her chest like a wet wool coat. At home, Mark was on the couch where she'd left him that morning—phone in one hand, the other dangling off the side, fingers brushing the carpet where the cat, Buster, lay like a small orange judgment. The cat opened one yellow eye, then closed it again. Even the animals had given up on them.

In the corner aquarium, the last goldfish floated at an odd angle, its silver belly catching the gray light through the window. Elena had bought it the week they moved in, back when she still believed in fresh starts. Now it rotated slowly, trapped in its small circular world, and she wondered if it was waiting for someone to notice it was dying.

"We should talk," she said to Mark.

"Mmhmm," he said, not looking up.

They'd been having this conversation for months—not talking, never talking. Elena had become a zombie in her own marriage, walking through rooms she couldn't remember entering, eating meals she couldn't remember tasting. Her friends asked how she was and she said fine, fine, and somewhere inside, a version of herself was screaming, but that version felt farther away every day.

She stood in the center of the living room, rain still dripping from her hair. The goldfish rolled to the surface, gasping.

"Mark."

"What?" Finally, his eyes lifted, annoyed, distant. Like she was a telemarketer who'd called at dinner.

Elena looked at the cat, at the dying fish, at the man who had promised to hold her heart carefully and instead treated it like something he'd get to later, maybe, when there was time. She thought about the palm reader's crooked finger tracing the wrong life.

She took the bull by the horns, as her mother used to say, though her mother had never left anything in her life.

"I'm done," Elena said. "I'm done pretending we're not already over."

Mark's phone slipped from his hand. The cat sat up, finally interested. The goldfish seemed to right itself, though maybe that was just wishful thinking.

"What?" he said again, but this time the annoyance was gone, replaced by something that looked almost like fear. "Elena—"

"I'll send for my things." She was already at the door, her hand on the knob, her palm tingling where the old woman had touched it. "The fish is yours. So's the cat, if you'll actually feed him this time."

"You're leaving over a fish?" He sounded like he was trying to make it ridiculous, like she was being unreasonable.

Elena laughed, and it surprised her—how good it felt. "No, Mark. I'm leaving because I forgot how to want to stay."

The door clicked shut behind her. Outside, the rain had stopped, leaving the world washed clean and strange. She didn't know where she was going, but for the first time in three years, the life line on her palm felt like it might actually be hers to follow.