‘The cards work because you draw them with your energy,’ Ethel said with no small amount of drama. She was very good at the performance part of the job, even if I wasn’t having a bar of the rest of it. ‘I can tell you their meaning, you are the only one who can know what that means to you.’

She turned over the second card.

‘The Chariot?’ Evan said. ‘Am I getting a new car?’

‘Reversed Chariot,’ she corrected. ‘Upright, it suggests control, success, action, but reversed, it tells us you are stuck. You have a lack of direction, a lack of self-discipline. You are in opposition with yourself.’

‘Huh,’ Evan scratched his head and gave a lopsided grin that didn’t make it up to his eyes.

‘It fits?’ I asked.

‘More than I’d like,’ he answered.

‘Final card,’ Ethel said, tapping the table as she turned it over. ‘This is your future as it stands today.’

‘The Two of Cups,’ he picked up the card and traced a finger around the two figures in the illustration, then held it up next to my face. ‘Hey, she looks kind of like you.’

‘Spitting image,’ I said with a smile. ‘Apart from the red hair and green eyes and the fact she’s a drawing.’

‘Two of Cups is a beautiful card.’ Ethel looked happy as she scooped up the cards and shuffled them back into a pile. ‘It tells us you will find a true love, mutual attraction, and unified feeling. It’s the card most people want to see in their spread.’

‘Convenient,’ I muttered as she slapped the deck down in front of me. ‘For someone being paid to read tarot cards to rich people at a fancy party.’

‘Now you,’ she ordered. ‘Shuffle and cut.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, awkwardly flopping my hands around like dead fish. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, it’s just that I’ve never really gone in for fate and destiny and telling the future. If it was that reliable, wouldn’t we all be doing it all the time?’

‘Do you eat sugar?’ Ethel asked.

I thought of the half a Mars Bar still in my room and nodded.

‘And do you drink alcohol?’

‘Um, on occasion.’

‘But you know both of those things are bad for you and you do them anyway?’ she tapped the cards. ‘The cards guide us to the truth we already know, this is all. They can’t hurt you, they cannot reveal any dark secrets you are unaware of. If I could give you a book with your future written out on every page, most would choose to look away.’

‘I think she’s done this before,’ Evan hissed in my ear.

‘Think of a question, something you really want to know,’ Ethel said. ‘And we shall see.’