“Ha. You’ve been talking to my mom, huh? She wants me in rehab. Twelve-stepping it with all those fake-ass losers. Avoiding trouble isn’t my strong suit. There’s something bad—well, I pretty much run smack into it.” Her eyes started to water, and I looked down at the floor. There was a pair of shoes in her bag, stilettos with laces that must have climbed up her calf like vines. It was only then that I remembered where I had seen her before, her face contoured differently in the shadows, her mouth traced with red lipstick. Waiting in the dark corner of a casino bar until a man came and sat down next to her, angling herself toward him, arranging her legs so her ankle pressed against his.

I tried again. “These cards are a warning. I can’t see what they are warning you about, exactly. But you should be careful, I think. Take care of yourself. Maybe the journey you need to take is back home. Back to your mom.”

“Maybe. Maybe you’re right.” Her voice had changed, and the hardness in her face seemed to break apart. A few tears rolled down her cheeks. When she wiped them away, I noticed one of her fake nails had come off, and the real nail underneath it looked tender and pink.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that everything feels so … fucked.”

I didn’t need to pretend to know what she meant. The eviction notice. The memory of Tom’s tongue in my mouth. I understood.

“How much do I owe?”

It felt wrong to charge her for such a harsh reading. But then I pictured the yellow notice again. I knew I would need to use my California fund to save the shop. That I would have to start over. “Twenty.”

She reached into that big bag, underneath the high heels, and pulled on a strap, produced her purse. It felt like déjà vu, at first, my brain jumping and skipping through time, but it was the same bag that the other woman, the one with the locket, had. A tooled leather purse with an oval of a turquoise stone at the center, right above the clasp. She took out a fat roll of bills and held out a twenty. I hadn’t noticed before that she had small, almost childish hands.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

“The cash? Ha. You don’t wanna know, sweetie.”

“No … no. I mean the bag.”