The Reading I Didn't Want to Give

The fifth card told me everything I needed to know, and I sat back from the spread and did nothing for a while.

She had booked a general reading. No question. That usually means the person either trusts the process completely or does not know how to articulate what they actually want to ask. Sometimes both.

I do not remember what I expected to see. Probably nothing in particular. General readings are open territory. Career. Family. Inner weather. Could be anything.

It was not anything.

It was betrayal. Clear, structural, already in progress.

Not the dramatic kind. Not an affair with evidence and confrontation. The quieter kind. The kind where someone is living a double life in small, careful increments. Telling partial truths. Redirecting money, attention, energy toward something or someone she did not know about.

The cards did not say who. They never do. They showed the shape of the thing, not the name attached to it.

I sat with the spread for a long time before I started writing.

Here is what no one tells you about this work: the hard readings are not the ones with difficult cards. The Tower is not hard. Death is not hard. Those cards have weight, but they are honest about it. You see them and you know you are in serious territory.

The hard readings are the ones where you have to decide what to say and how to say it, knowing that your words are going to crack something open in someone's life.

I could soften it. Readers do that. You learn the language of hedging. "There may be some inconsistencies in communication." "You might want to pay attention to where energy is flowing in your partnership." Soft words. Room to dismiss.

I do not work that way.

But I also do not drop a grenade into someone's inbox without care.

So I wrote it slowly. I started with the stable things. What she had built. Her competence, her groundedness, the way the cards showed someone who had constructed a life with intention. I let her see herself first.

Then I wrote the rest.

I told her there was deception present. That someone close to her was operating with a second agenda she had not been shown. That this was not paranoia or suspicion on her part. It was structure. It was already happening.

I told her the cards suggested she already knew. Not consciously. But in the way you know things before you let yourself know them. The small observations that do not add up. The questions you stop yourself from asking because you are afraid of the answers.

I read the email four times before I sent it.

Then I sent it.

She replied two days later. Three lines.

"Thank you for your honesty. I think I knew. I just couldn't say it to myself."

That was all.

I never heard from her again. I do not know what she did with it. I do not know if she confronted anyone, or left, or quietly started paying closer attention. The reading ended where my involvement ended: with the send button.

But I think about her sometimes.

Not because I wonder what happened. That is not my business, and speculation is pointless.

I think about her because that reading cost me something.

Not dramatically. I did not lose sleep or carry her situation around with me for weeks. But there was a weight in writing those words. A recognition that I was handing someone a piece of information that would change how she saw her own life.

I did not cause the betrayal. I did not create the deception.

But I named it. And once something is named, it cannot be un-seen.

That is the part of this work no one talks about. You are not predicting the future. You are not even really telling people things they do not already know.

You are saying out loud what they have been afraid to say to themselves.

And sometimes, being the one who says it first is heavier than it looks.

I know what it is to be on the other side.

Twenty-five years ago, I was her. Different circumstances, same architecture. A man I thought I loved. A relationship I had built my identity around. And a truth I refused to look at directly.

I knew he was unfaithful. Not because anyone told me. Not because I found evidence. I knew the way you know something in your body before your mind agrees to process it. The way a room feels different when someone has been lying in it.

But I did not open the doors that would confirm it.

I did not check. I did not ask the questions that would force answers. I kept my gaze carefully averted, because as long as I did not look, I could pretend there was nothing to see.

I was young. I thought what I felt was love. Maybe it was, in the way young love often is: desperate, hungry, more about what I needed him to be than who he actually was.

I told myself stories. He was stressed. He was distant because of work.

I trusted him because the alternative was uncharted grounds.

And then life decided I had hidden long enough.

It was not a discovery. It was a detonation. The kind of truth that does not knock on the door and wait to be invited in. It kicks the door down and stands in your living room and dares you to keep pretending.

I will not go into the details. They belong to a version of me that no longer exists, and they are not the point.

The point is that I wish someone had told me.

I wish someone had looked at me, seen what I was refusing to see, and said it plainly. Not gently. Not hedged with soft language and room to dismiss. Plainly. The way I wrote it to her.

Would I have listened? I do not know. Probably not. I was so invested in the story I had constructed that I might have rejected anything that threatened it.

But I would have had the words.

They would have sat somewhere in my mind, even if I pushed them away. And when the truth finally exploded, I would have known that I was not crazy. That someone else had seen it. That my instincts had been right all along, even when I refused to follow them.

That is what I think about when I write readings like hers.

I think about the version of me who needed someone to say it clearly and did not have that person.

I think about how much easier it might have been to rebuild if I had not spent years doubting my own perception.

I think about the cost of kindness that is actually cowardice. The soft words that let everyone feel comfortable while the person who most needs the truth keeps stumbling in the dark.

I do not know if she confronted him. I do not know if she left, or stayed, or found out I was wrong about all of it.

But I know I told her the truth as the cards showed it.

And I know that if I had been her, twenty-five years ago, I would have wanted someone to do the same for me.

That is why I do this work the way I do.

Not because it is comfortable. It is not.

Because I remember what it cost me to not know.

And I will not be the reader who lets someone else pay that price for the sake of staying pleasant.