“But at some point, don’t you want to confront him?” Madison asked.
“Yes. When I can actually do that.”
“You mean and not cry,” Soraya said.
“There’s nothing wrong with crying,” Madison said. “Historically, the patriarchy has turned tears into a sign of weakness in order to invalidate women’s emotions.”
“Well,” Nora said. “Fuck the patriarchy. But I still can’t think of anything worse than crying.”
“He’s your husband,” Soraya pointed out. “He cheated on you. You get to cry and scream and do whatever you want, short of murder.”
“There’s no point. You can do all of that. Cry and scream and whatever else, but it doesn’t make people stay. You just end up debasing yourself for a man who’s too detached from the marriage to even have an honest conversation. Uninterested, thank you.” Nora shuffled the cards and laid out one. “Past.” Then she laid out a second. “Present.” Then a third. “Future.”
She flipped over the first card, the Moon. She only had a little bit of experience with tarot at this point, but the Moon was a card that confused her, which was ironic and fitting because it was a card about confusion. But how was her past confused?
She turned over the next card.Death.Great. Her present was death.
But she already knew that. It was the slow, dying breath of her marriage. Of the life she’d imagined living. Of her safety and her belief in happily ever after.
She turned over the third card. The future. The Five of Cups. On the card was a man staring at three spilled cups with a look of despair on his face, while there were two upright behind them.
It was a card of ingratitude. Of not seeing everything you had.
Great. So her future was being an ungrateful bitch after experiencing death and confusion.
She blew out a breath and flipped the cards back over.
“What?” Daisy asked.
“I’m not connecting with the cards at the moment.”
“Admittedly, that wasn’t the most flattering reading, but you know you can always change the future card.”
“I don’t think that’s how tarot works,” Nora said.
“I don’t mean just draw a different card.” Daisy sounded lightly exasperated. “That reading was about what your future looks like now, based on your feelings. I’m not sure that tarot tells the future so much as reads the energy around you. Right now, your future looks like that because you won’t be able to see what you have because you’re focusing on what you lost.”
“You do one.” Nora was annoyed at Daisy’s arch tone. She loved Daisy, she really did, but the problem with having a friend who did all that reading and research and crossed all her T’s and dotted her I’s was that she tended to be irritating in moments like this because she was too pragmatic.
Daisy sat down in front of the cards and shuffled them. “Past.” She drew one out of the spread-out fan. “Present.” She hesitated. “Future. The Ten of Wands. The Lovers.” Her cheeks turned bright red. “The Two of Swords.”
“See?” Nora said. “It’s not fun when your future card is weird.”
Daisy frowned. “It’s about choices. A choice only I can make. I was overburdened, and now I’m ...”
“Getting properly shagged?” Nora suggested.
“Yes. That.” Daisy cleared her throat. “Then there’s going to be a choice that no one can make for me.”
“Swords tend to be sharp,” Nora said. “So difficult choices, maybe.”
Daisy glared at her. “You’re only saying that because you’re mad about your reading.”
“I’m not mad.”
Nora was, in fact, mad.
“I’ll go.” Soraya sounded tentative, but her offer to go at all was a shock. “Sometimes I’ve been ... casually looking at the ones in my apartment. Daisy, I liked it when you said it was a reflection of your own energy. The depth of what you feel. I guess that’s kind of how I think of it, and why it feels okay for me. I just hadn’t articulated it before. I’m not asking a spirit to show me anything. I’m trying to make sense of what’s happening around me and inside of me.”
