The third card is the future: the Seven of Swords. I always flinched at this one—it showed a thief creeping away, looking over his shoulder at someone catching him in the act. It meant you were going to try to sneak away from something, or it could be a warning that there was betrayal waiting for you ahead. It was a sign to trust your intuition if you suspected someone was going to wrong you. As far as I saw it, these cards were a warning. If they were accurate, then this woman’s life had gone from stable to chaotic and was about to get worse.

I was always telling people that the cards weren’t the future, necessarily—they were subtler than that. The cards were reminders that we could make choices, a reminder to look at your life and parse out how you needed to think about things, how you might act, what options were available to you. I didn’t believe in fate coming down like a guillotine or sweeping you up out of your life like a hot air balloon. We were always somewhere in the middle: everyone had obstacles, but we also had free will. If I saw the woman—I wished that I knew her name—again, I would warn her, but I’d have to tell her that, too: that she still had a choice.

A fly buzzed against the window of the shop, slow and drowsy in the heat. I realized what the feeling was, the one that had been creeping along my skin for days. It was the tickle of insect legs. I reached for a magazine, rolled it up, and smashed the fly against the glass. Its guts left behind a greasy smear. But a second later, I felt it again, the creep of a fly along the top of my ear, and when I reached to brush it away there was nothing there.

JANE 3

SHE CAN’T LOOK AT THE pictures on the slot machines—the pair of cherries joined at the stem with a single green leaf, the yellow sickle of a banana—without thinking of her daughter’s picture books, the pages made of thick cardboard, the images simplified into the most perfect versions of themselves. The words she was supposed to read in a slow, sweet voice so the baby could repeat them back to her one day. She can’t listen to the jingle of coins without thinking of the rattles she shook and shook above the baby’s bassinet, pleading with her to be quiet. Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.