Page 100 of The Next Lie

Sonny appears at my elbow. “Why, yes, thank you.”

I glare at her.

She beams. “For kicks.”

The woman closes her book. “Twenty dollars.”

Sonny slaps a twenty on the table before I can object.

I sit because apparently I am weak against peer pressure when it comes from a five-foot-nothing woman with perfectly winged eyeliner.

The reader holds out her hand. I give her mine.

Her fingers are cool and dry. She turns my palm upward, and for a few seconds, her face stays bored. Then her thumb stops at the center of my palm.

The air in the shop seems to tighten.

“What?” I ask.

She does not answer right away, and Sonny’s smile fades.

The woman traces a line near my wrist. “You were carried away from water and taken to the city of iron.”

My pulse skips.

“That’s vague,” I say, but my voice shakes under the challenge.

“It should be.”

“I paid twenty dollars for vague?”

Sonny whispers, “I paid.”

The woman looks at me over the top of her glasses. “You came back to the water because the dead called you.”

I start to pull my hand away but her grip tightens.

“Two sisters,” she says. “One in front of you. One behind a door. Both angry.”

My mouth goes dry. Sonny goes very still beside me.

The woman keeps her eyes on my palm. “A father without blood has crossed into the city.”

My heart slams once, hard enough to hurt.

“What does that mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“I hate this shop.”

The woman ignores that. Her thumb moves again, pressing into a crease near the base of my hand. Her expression changes, and for the first time, I see something like pity.

“No child opens a door on purpose when she does not know a door exists.”

My skin prickles with goosebumps.

I hear a phone ringing in a house that no longer stands the way it did. I hear my own small voice giving an address because the operator asked me to. I hear footsteps I have spent fifteen years blaming on a man with ink around his wrist.