My guilt.
Because if I’d said no hard enough, loud enough, I think she would’ve stopped.
I follow her to the kitchen table that’s still the same, solid oak that’s been worn and polished over time. She pulls a pack of tarot cards from a drawer, wrapped in silk, and starts to shuffle them, her mouth murmuring words I can’t decipher.
“Shuffle these.” She passes the pack to me.
I shuffle the oversized cards and remember how Hedda taught me how to play rummy and poker and whist.
Spread them out in front of you and pick seven.”
“How do I choose.”
“However you like.”
I pass her my choice and she tells me to choose another seven, then another. I watch as she turns them face up, her forehead creased with concentration.
There are faces and hearts and stakes and pictures of hares and salmon. When she speaks I don’t hear the words, just noise.
“There’s a battle. An ongoing one but I don’t know whether it’s internal or more with what’s around you. You have a choice to make but you’re blindfolded. Not everything has been revealed. There’s more that you don’t know.”
“There’s a lot I don’t know.”
“This man with the dark hair and dark skin. He knows a lot but he hasn’t made up his mind yet. And the woman – she’ll have a choice to make.”
Hedda turns more cards, death, a hanged man, the world and then lovers. The final card.
Her eyes flick up to me.
“You have a lot of major events to come. Sacrifice. A period away. Nothing much else is clear. But there’s choice.”
“There’s always choice.”
She stands up. “There isn’t. We think there is, but there isn’t. The choice comes later but it isn’t yours.”
“What do you mean?”
I see her eyes fill with tears.
“Sometimes you have to walk away and see who follows. They don’t always follow when you want them to, but wait. They’ll come.”
I force a laugh. “Anything good in this?”
She nods. “New life. Not Majken’s.”
I turn towards the door.
“Don’t trust your sister, Ben. Promise me that.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because she knew everything. And she never told me otherwise.”
I nod. That tells me all I need to know.
Majken never had my back and Hedda would shit on anyone for her own purposes.
* * *
