What The Palm Reader Washed Away

The beachside bar in Key West was exactly the kind of place you ended up at forty-two, divorced, and asking yourself what happened to the decade you thought would be different. Elena sat nursing her third gin and tonic, watching the palm trees bend against the wind off the water, their fronds like desperate fingers reaching for something they'd never quite catch.

"You've got death in your marriage line," the old woman had told her that morning, reading Elena's palm with practiced detachment. "But you already knew that."

Elena had paid her forty dollars for confirmation of what she'd spent three years ignoring. What she hadn't told the palm reader—that she couldn't say aloud even now, three gin and tonics in—was that she didn't miss Mark. She missed Barnaby.

Barnaby was Mark's cat, an imperious orange tabby who had slept on Elena's side of the bed more often than Mark had. When Mark moved out last month, he'd taken the cat. Elena hadn't fought him on it. She'd been too exhausted to fight for anything.

"You okay?" The bartender's voice cut through her thoughts. He was maybe twenty-five, with the kind of jawline that would make him regret his choices in ten years.

"I'm fine," she said, and it wasn't entirely a lie. The water beyond the deck was dark now, the sun having surrendered hours ago. She thought about swimming out into it—just walking into the Gulf until her feet couldn't find bottom anymore. She wouldn't, but the thought was there, constant and seductive.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Mark: "Barnaby keeps asking for you. He's sleeping in your old spot."

Elena stared at the message until the screen went dark. The palm reader had been wrong about one thing, at least. The death line wasn't what mattered. It was the life that kept going anyway, in all its stupid, aching particularity. The cat. The empty side of the bed. The way the wind moved through the palms like it was trying to tell her something she couldn't quite hear.

She ordered another drink and watched the water take the last of the light, thinking about how you could love something that was never really yours to begin with.