“Don’t worry. I’m not in the habit of entertaining wild men.”

She gives her head a little shake and smiles. “You know I wouldn’t mind it if you did entertain a man, for a change. He doesn’t have to be wild.”

“Wouldn’t that take all the fun out of it?”

“I’m only saying, if your goal is to become an old maid, then you’re on the right track.”

“Mother.”

“What?”

Seemingly, she will not flip the next card until I have provided her some satisfactory reply. “It isn’t as if the relationships in this family have worked out very well, is it?”

“Well,” she hedges, “we don’t know for certain whether things with Donovan are really over. Though to be perfectly honest with you, I was never terribly fond of him.” She leans in close, conspiratorially. “Don’t tell your sister I said that.”

As much as it pleases me to share secrets with my mother, I think to myself that Elizabeth would, in fact, be thrilled to hear it. She would feast on the knowledge of our mother’s disapproval, which would likely drive her right back into Don’s arms. It would be just like her to do that.

To be honest, I could never tell whether I like Don or not. I can recall times when he has been something akin to a friend, the kind you might casually share a beer with—but I can think, too, of times when his easy mood soured all of a sudden and he turned his vicious sights on the nearest available target. He is the kind of man you might tiptoe around, enjoying his presence when he is in a good mood but always wondering, in the back of your mind, if the wrong word will ruin it. The world is full of these men, having told them long ago that they are entitled to the sea and the stars and all manner of life beneath.

Still, in some ways I know I am indebted to him, as uncomfortable as that makes me. I did almost take out his eye.

My mother flips the next card. “This one represents the immediate future.”

The words are hardly out of her mouth when she nearly sucks them back in: riding across the tarot card on a white red-eyed horse is a skeleton clad in a suit of armor, who goes by the name of Death.

“Now, before you get upset,” she says in a rush, “the Death card is the most misunderstood of all the cards. It doesn’t necessarily signify physical death, but other kinds of profound change, the kind of change that destroys what came before.”

The words do nothing to mitigate the unease in her voice.

Behind the skeleton holding his flag of death, the sun sets between two towers, above which a gray purgatorial sky presides over the corpses that lie in the horse’s path. “These are the towers from the Moon card,” she says. “That means there’s a connection between your current confusion and the change that’s coming.”