“And you want four kids?”

“I’m an only child; it’s part of my God-shaped hole.”

“Your what?”

He tapped his suit pocket and gestured with his head. I followed him under the flat-screen TV hanging from the ceiling to the red EXIT sign at the side door. It was a gorgeous summer night, the kind where you could feel that people had been stuck inside all day, bathing in the air-conditioning of their office buildings, waiting for the moment to feel the warm, thick breeze and remember again they were primal and human. It was almost as loud outside as inside, without the relentless bass of the music.

“I hope you didn’t bring me out here to show me any hole on your body.”

Ted smiled and slipped a vape pen out of his breast pocket. He offered it to me first.

“What is it?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t accept it no matter the answer.

“Little bit of weed.”

“Weed is for lazy people,” I said.

“Coke is for the gunners?”

Touché. A cliché for a cliché. In reality, I wasn’t into any substances that made me feel out of control.

“I thought you were going to arrest me,” Ted said.

“Is that what you think lawyers do?”

“I’m not an idiot, I was trying to flirt.”

Ted took a pull off his vape and stared at the people in the pizza place across the street. I touched his arm and waited for him to look at me.

“So was I. We’ve gotten off track. Are you into God, is that what you’re trying to say?” I asked.

Ted shrugged. “I wasn’t speaking literally. It’s a metaphor.”

“For what?”

Ted exhaled a plume of smoke, directing it up toward the sky. It floated like a thought bubble over his head. I could tell he was intrigued by my persistence, my willingness to go there with him, but he had to calculate how much he wanted to reveal and how soon.

“I come from a simple, secure blue-collar family in Michigan. Parents are still together. No chaos. No poverty. No abuse. And yet still I’m driven to extremes.”

“Extremes?”

Ted laughed. He had a nice laugh.

“I wouldn’t be extreme to you, but according to my parents and everyone I grew up with in my town, I am. They want a nice solid life. I want it all. Success, money, family, love. A big, huge life. Not the illusion of it, but the real thing. Even if it takes time to build.”

We fell hard and fast after that night. From then on, every weekend would begin with a date night on Thursday, and we wouldn’t leave each other’s side until Monday morning, even if we spent it with rotating groups of friends. This weekend away to Stars Harbor is a natural extension of those early years.

“I knew she was smart and fiercely loyal to her family, but when I learned she was funny, I was done,” Ted explains to Rini.

“And same for you?” Rini asks me.

I blush. “It wasn’t quite that.”

“Ah, it was your sexual compatibility. Your Venus signs are well aligned.”

“Didn’t know you had it in you, buddy,” Rick says, slapping Ted on the back.

“I’ll say this,” I say. “The thing that I loved was that this was a man I could count on to be a rock in tumultuous times, but who also had emotions and heady stuff he grappled with.”

“In bed,” Rick says.

“That’s his Scorpio Mercury,” Rini says. “He works things out in intimacy. Sex communicates his wants, his fears, his plans for the future, everything he’s going through. But you struggle with communication, Margot. Not only are you a Pisces Sun, but your Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus are all in Pisces. That’s a stellium.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“It means a lot of things. That you live in a fantasy world and reality rarely lives up to your expectations.”

“True, but I pivot quickly. What else?”

“That means other people’s pain is your pain and other people’s joy is your joy.”

“Isn’t that called love? You share in the good times and the bad times.”

“For you, it’s not only love. You feel this way with strangers. This level of empathy is karmic. In reality, I’d go so far as to say that you feel things ten times deeper and stronger than the person experiencing it firsthand.”

Tears sting my nose when Rini shares this hard truth.

“The problem is you keep it all inside. You’re an emotional vault. Other people love that about you—you share nothing of what they tell you. But you need to share more.”

“Need is a strong word,” I say. My attempt at a joke doesn’t land.

“It’s the right word,” Rini says.

I smile and try to act casual, but she’s right. There’s no limit to the pain I can take on. It distracts me from my own.

ADAM

Rini sits behind a desk in her big bohemian dress, her hands folded over a stack of papers, and I wonder what she’s hiding under there. She appears aloof and disinterested, perhaps in an attempt to get me to spill my guts. I walk around the study, surveying the hundreds of books that stretch out behind her.

“Well, well, well, you seem to love changing up my itinerary,” Rini says.

My reading wasn’t supposed to be for another hour, but I wasn’t hungry as they set down the food for dinner so I asked if we could get this over. It was the only moment I saw Rini look flustered, but she agreed without hesitation.

“Thanks for being so flexible,” I say with a wink.

“I’m actually surprised you didn’t opt out of this reading,” she says, ignoring my charm.

“Really? Why?”