I cannot tell you how exhausted I was that night. I had not gone to sleep the night before, had spent the entirety of the evening drowning my heartache in booze and casual sex. By that afternoon, when I spoke to Nick on the phone, I was a bit delirious. I had taken a Tylenol PM four hours prior. It had not worked out as planned.
"We have to get off the phone," Nick finally told me after I finished a monologue about polar bears, which was fascinating in my mind. "You have to go lie down," he said.
"Five more minutes!" I begged, petulant, a clingy child, never wanting to let him go.
"No," he said, much to my surprise. "I'm being stern with you now. You have to go lie down. I'll talk to you in a couple days. Okay?"
I hung up, languished in bed for two hours — weeping, feeling bored and frustrated — before I finally drifted off. My nap lasted forty-five minutes.
The psychic continued, "I see here that you will always be loved enormously, but it will be hard for you to hold onto that love." Her voice became gentle. "You blame yourself for this. You think you push people away. But this soulmate, he disappeared fast, and it was nothing you did."
A tear slipped off my cheek and splattered onto the table. She looked up at me, startled. "Don't cry," she said, kindly. That's what nearly everyone says in this moment.
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I pulled away from her, almost snapped back my hand.
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Don't cry. It's rare that I don't hear that, and when people don't say it, you know they truly understand you. My mom does not say it. My best friends don't say it. Nick never said it. That afternoon, as I garbled out a tear-choked explanation about something or other, he just said: "Slow down, sweetie. I'm having trouble understanding you."
I nodded to the woman, wiped a knuckle underneath my eye and tried to suck it up. I didn't want to talk about Nick anymore. I didn't want to screw up my makeup.
"You're not sleeping much," she told me.
And that was the moment — for better or worse — when my skepticism crumbled. Maybe my resistance had been worn down by the talk about a soulmate, a soulmate who still cared deeply about me, a soulmate I lost but it was not my fault. I don't know; I was so tired. I actually let out a little laugh. "I'm an insomniac," I said.
"It's a decision tree," said my colleague at work, a born skeptic, when I told him the story. "She tells you answers based on your responses and reactions. It's all show. It's entertainment."
I know, I know, but then she said something I couldn't figure out.
"You recently received something. It's dark, there's a shadow around it. I'm not sure why, but this object has a great deal of negative energy. Someone else may have had it for a while."
I pulled away from her, almost snapped back my hand. "That kind of creeps me out."
The day before, I had received the last of the evidence from my mugging more than two years ago. I'd been hit over the head with a pistol and robbed in the French Quarter. The dude took my Dolly Parton tote bag, but I got something in exchange: I fell in love with the detective on the case. That's Nick. Six months after the hearing, I visited him in New Orleans, and soon after, I decided to move there to be with him, rent a ramshackle shotgun in the Bywater, paint the walls an extravagant color, plant an overgrown garden in back. Nick and I talked about marriage, not if, but when.
Six months later, just a few months before I planned to uproot myself from my life in New York, he ended our relationship. "I can't do this right now," he told me over the phone one night, no warning but a couple days of ominous silence. "I met you at the wrong time." Although he didn't mention it, his divorce had been final that week.
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