“You met a man you’ll love forever during your gap year. You didn’t return to finish university.” Myrtle’s voice followed her. “He’s still overseas, waiting for you. He’ll help to end your family curse...”

Carla stumbled into the waiting area, trying to feign composure as her gran, sister and aunts looked up at her expectantly. She fumbled to stop her phone from recording.

“Told you she was amazing,” Jess said. “What did she tell you?”

Lucinda craned her neck. “Um, are you okay, honey? You look a little washy.”

Carla took a deep breath and held the air in her lungs. She counted to ten to compose herself and brushed an imaginary speck of fluff off her trousers. There was no way she was going to give credence to anything Myrtle had told her, especially because Jess, Lucinda, Mimi and Evelyn would hang on to every word. They might pass the story along a chain of relations, where it could twist and take on a new narrative.

“Nothing very exciting.” Carla plastered on a smile, trying not to think of the various old flames she’d met while traveling. “Myrtle just told me what I already know. Tom’s my soulmate, we’re getting married soon, and we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together.”

Four

Predictions

For the rest of her evening in Silverpool, Carla felt like her pendant chain was fastened too tightly around her neck, making it hard for her to breathe. She couldn’t focus on mixing cocktails—the next activity Jess had planned for the evening. The guy serving them had a shaved head and sleeve tattoos that made his arms look embroidered. He referred to himself as a mixologist.

“I’ve studied and practiced skills for mixing and creating drinks,” he said as he poured spirits and fruit juices into a silver container and shook it with great flourish. He explained how cocktails are made up of three elements: the core base spirit, the balance of sugar and then bitters used for seasoning.

Carla would usually have loved learning about the chemical element of the activity. She liked knowing how things were constructed, and as a child had been known to dismantle radios to see how they worked. Now her thoughts couldn’t settle. One moment they were back in Myrtle’s hut, with the fortune teller’s violet eyes piercing into her soul. The next, she desperately wanted to see Tom, so he could reassure her the predictions were utterly nonsensical. Of course Carla hadn’t met her perfect match while traveling during her gap year. It was a ridiculous, laughable claim, and their Logical Love statistics proved it.

Carla pictured Tom at home with his scalpel, sheets of paper and card, carefully cutting out and assembling his board games, and she chanted their percentage match in her head, Eighty-four, eighty-four. Myrtle must have gathered information about her prior to the reading and invented the rest. It made her feel like a little girl again, standing in front of the eerie Vadim.

The rest of her family were enjoying themselves. Evelyn had treated herself to a raspberry mojito, which gave her cheeks a bubblegum-pink flush, and Jess flirted with the mixologist, offering to read his palm. Mimi mixed exotic spirits, adding sprigs of rosemary and slices of pineapple, and Lucinda took command of the cocktail shaker. Her wedding ring winked as she poured herself a nonalcoholic margarita.

When Ted had passed away six years ago, Lucinda’s house had been flooded with her friends and family. They huddled together like penguins in harsh weather conditions, bringing her lasagna and herbal tea. They gave Lucinda manicures, ran her bath and combed her hair to help her through the dark days, just as they’d done when Suzette died. They looked through photo albums with her and brought cotton handkerchiefs to mop her tears.

Ted had been a solid presence in all their lives, an amiable, quiet man with ruddy cheeks and a shock of white hair. He kept colored pencils in his jacket pocket and showed Carla how to draw cars and rabbits. He always smiled at Lucinda as if he’d won the top prize at bingo.

Even as a girl, Carla knew she wanted a relationship just like her gran and granddad’s, a caring, warm mutual love that would last for a lifetime.

Her subsequent marriage to Aaron must have been a moment of foolishness, a rush of hormones, or even a bout of rebellion against the superstitions and worries her family had instilled in her. After her divorce, Carla’s skin had felt sore and pitted, like she had deep acne scars that were impossible to get rid of.

Sometime later, she’d watched a TV dating show where a woman had compiled a long list of things she looked for in a partner, and the host had ripped it up, saying it wasn’t realistic. Yet, it had planted an idea in Carla’s head. What if both parties had a list of questions? What if their answers formed a solid ground for dating? A lightbulb had flicked on in her head, and the idea for Logical Love was born. Working on questions, research, probability and branding, then locating premises and more had taken her mind off her failed marriage.

Did Carla herself have an ideal type? She’d say it was someone who was calm, stable, kind, friendly and not Aaron.

Carla gulped down one cocktail after another, not bothering to listen to their names or to identify the flavors. She hoped the alcohol would get rid of Myrtle’s words in her head, but it only made them more vivid.

“I think that’s enough for you, honey,” Lucinda said, taking a glass from her hand. “Try one of my alcohol-free cocktails instead. You don’t want a fuzzy head in the morning. Are you thinking about Myrtle’s reading?”

Carla’s brain was cannonball-heavy in her skull. “No.” She glugged one of her gran’s concoctions instead, not wanting to share that the fortune teller had pretty much condemned her upcoming marriage. “Nothing to declare.”

During the drive back home, her relatives chatted and laughed around her about their own predictions. Carla smiled and tried to seem interested but she’d heard enough about fortunes to last a lifetime. She leaned against Mimi’s shoulder, and her eyelids started to flutter.

The next thing she knew, someone was prodding her knee. Carla hazily opened one eye and found herself alone in the car with her gran, parked on the drive of her bungalow. “Where’s Jess?” she asked with a yawn.

“I dropped her off, along with your aunties. You’ve been having a good old snore.”

“Oops, sorry.”

“You’d better sleep at my place, so I can keep an eye on you.”

Carla agreed this was a good idea. It was already past midnight, too late to call Tom, who was usually in bed before eleven o’clock. He was an early bird rather than a night owl.

He hadn’t messaged her, and she wondered if he was curious about where Jess and Gran had taken her for the evening. He viewed her family with a mix of warmth and amusement, coupled with bewilderment and slight fear.

In comparison, Tom’s folks were rather ordinary. He was an only child from a tiny family and Carla had only spoken to his parents via video calls because they lived in France, where they ran a small hotel. She’d get to meet them in person for the first time just before the wedding.

To Carla, her gran’s bungalow was the coziest place on the planet, with plants on every surface and lots of brightly colored rugs and knitted cushions. Good-luck trinkets and ornaments could be found everywhere. A model of Lord Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god of beginnings, sat on the mantelpiece, and a lucky maneki-neko gold cat waved its paw on the windowsill of the living room. Lucinda claimed the acorns in a bowl on her coffee table represented the might of the oak tree and its ability to withstand lightning.

As a child, Carla had played hopscotch in her gran’s backyard, trying not to step on the gaps between the paving stones in case a bogeyman came to get her. If she grazed a pavement crack with her toe, she lay in bed at night with her covers pulled up to her eyes, half-expecting a strange figure to emerge from the shadows.

“Go on, off to bed with you,” Lucinda said, opening her front door. “You can sleep off the Singapore slings in your old room. Make sure you drink lots of water and I’ll bring you some toast and jam.”

Carla shook her head. “I really can’t eat anything, thanks.” She padded groggily along the hallway and into her old room, pleased there were still some of her old clothes and belongings in the wardrobe. Lucinda found it comforting to keep them around her home.

Carla switched on the bedside lamp and picked up a photo of her mum off the bedside table.

Suzette Carter wore a straw hat and had freckles on her nose. She’d been captured on film while spinning around in a raspberry-red dress, so the fabric was a blur. It was the kind of wholesome image used to advertise breakfast cereal.

She touched her mum’s face, hating that she could hardly remember her voice. She did have pockets of memories of her, like the sun shining through her strawberry blonde hair so it looked like a halo, and how they used to sit at the dining table together threading glass beads onto strips of leather. At least she still had these pictures in her head, unlike Jess, who was only two when their mother died.

Carla placed the photograph back and wondered if Myrtle might have seen it, or other ones Lucinda had on display. What information might she have gleaned? She yawned, too tired to contemplate this stuff.

She found one of her old T-shirts to wear in bed and crouched down to feel around for a pair of socks in the bottom of the wardrobe. When her fingers hit something hard and rectangular, she pulled it out and realized it was the travel journal she’d kept during her gap year. There was a photo of her on the cover, younger, laughing and carefree. “I look like Mum,” she whispered to herself, not that aware of the resemblance before. She shivered and sat down on the bed, then pulled the covers around herself.

Carla’s travels had taken place before the iPhone was invented, prior to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. When you escaped, you really could escape. Each place she’d visited had been awarded a few pages in her journal, and she opened it up.

She’d added diary entries and pasted in concert tickets, menus, hand-drawn maps and a diving certificate. She’d recorded her travels on a pocket camera, developing her photos along the way. There were names and phone numbers written on beer coasters and scraps of paper. Some people she could remember and others she couldn’t.

She’d kept in touch with Gran and Jess via postcards and calls from pay phones on roadsides or in cafés, living in the moment without today’s expectation of sharing all your activity online. Friendships and relationships had been formed en route through chance meetings rather than via a database and algorithms. Carla had attempted to speak different languages, got lost in foreign towns, kissed strangers and ate food she’d never heard of. Things she’d never do now.

Flicking through the journal allowed smells and sounds to come alive in her memory, taking her back in time. She could almost taste olive oil on her tongue and hear the call of hawkers who sold fake designer handbags on street corners. She’d worn an ankle bracelet with tiny bells that tinkled when she walked and ate giant slices of watermelon for breakfast.

One photo showed her posing on the back of a motorbike, her arms wrapped around a charismatic English musician she’d met after his gig in Lisbon. “Adam Angelino,” she said aloud. He had been so cool.

She found a card for a hair salon in Barcelona, and saw she’d scrawled the name Pedro (Mr. Passionate) on the back. He’d insisted she go dancing with him, after he’d cut her hair.

As she turned the pages, other recollections filtered back, of Fidele, a warmhearted diving instructor in Sardinia who’d introduced her to a tiny purple octopus that lived in the shallows. She smiled ruefully as she pictured clinking beer bottles with him at sunset, thinking if it had been a different time, a different place, they could have been perfect together.

Then there had been Ruben, an intelligent teacher who’d showed her the sights of Amsterdam, taking her to many museums, writing poems for her and discussing Vincent van Gogh’s mental health until the early hours.

Daniel had been a penniless eco-warrior in Majorca who’d lived in a deserted farmhouse with fellow travelers, an abundance of chickens and no electricity. After a few weeks, Carla could no longer survive without running water and had decamped to a nearby hostel.

Her travels had allowed her to cast aside all her responsibilities at home for twelve months of freedom and possibility.

Carla rubbed the back of her neck, feeling guilty about revisiting romantic encounters from her past, if only in her thoughts. None of her exes from two decades ago compared to the wonderful relationship she had now with Tom.