"The one who is meant for you." She said it without any romantic flourish, without dramatics - simply as a fact she was relaying. "Joy or sorrow from that meeting will depend entirely on you."

Everything in Annabel wanted to push back against this. She was twenty-three years old and rational and she did not believe in destiny, did not believe in meant, did not believe that a stranger on Fifth Avenue could read her romantic future in the lines of her face.

She believed all of that and still said: "How will I know it's him?"

The old woman made a small sound - not quite a laugh. "You'll know."

And then she turned her face toward the street, and that was the end of it. Her hands folded in her lap. Her attention moved away from Annabel completely, as if a channel had been closed. No elaboration was coming. No admission that she'd been performing, no card or pamphlet or request for money. She simply sat and looked at the avenue.

Annabel waited another moment. Then she walked away.

She got forty feet - past a woman in a red coat, past a man reading a folded newspaper - before she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

She didn't turn around. She just stood there, her hand pressed flat against the center of her chest, letting people navigate around her.

The glass is beautiful. But it breaks.

She thought of Cassandra.

She had read the myth her sophomore year at Brown - the Trojan princess, daughter of Priam, prophetic and cursed. Apollo had given her the gift of true sight and then, when she refused him, stripped her of the one thing that would have made the gift useful: the ability to be believed. She had lived her whole life speaking true things to people who dismissed her, watched every disaster arrive precisely as she'd predicted, and not one piece of that foreknowledge had made any difference at all.

The cruelty of Cassandra's story wasn't the curse itself. It was the loneliness of being right about everything and changing nothing.

Annabel looked back over her shoulder.

The old woman was still sitting on the low stone wall, hands folded, watching the street. She was not looking at Annabel. She seemed to have forgotten Annabel entirely. She was simply there - very still, very small, a bright red scarf against the gray stone buildings behind her.

She had said what needed saying. She expected nothing from it.

Annabel felt a cold, specific dread that she did not allow herself to examine too closely.

She told herself: You don't believe in street prophecy. You have never believed in it.

She told herself: This is the technique. Say something vague and unsettling and let the listener supply the details.

She told herself: The glass castle is just a metaphor for a privileged upbringing. Anyone could have said that.

But the boots felt heavier under her arm. And London felt further away. And somewhere behind her sternum, in the place where the nameless nighttime feeling lived, something had shifted that she couldn't quite shift back.

She turned around and kept walking.

"Tell me you did not buy more shoes," Bennett called from the top of the stairs the moment she got through the front door.

The tightness in Annabel's chest loosened, just slightly. This was home. This was the particular, irreducible sound of home - her brother's voice before she'd even taken off her coat, already engaged in the ongoing project of monitoring her decisions.

"I bought boots," she said.

He appeared at the top of the stairs, magazine tucked under his arm, pointing at her with the satisfaction of a man whose predictions had come true. "Called it. This morning at breakfast. I said coat-or-shoes and James said scarf and now justice is served."

"You said coat."

"Category is correct." He came down the stairs and reached for the shopping bag. She let him take it because that was Bennett - commentary and assistance as a single inseparable package, two things that had never operated independently in his entire twenty-six years. "Hand it over. Damage assessment."

She followed him toward the kitchen.

Her father was at the kitchen table.

Richard Ellsworth was sixty-one, still straight-backed, still precise in the way of men who have decided exactly who they are going to be and never revisited the question. His reading glasses were pushed up into his silver hair. In front of him was a folder - the same kind that had been appearing on the kitchen table with increasing frequency over the last year. She had noticed it before. She had not asked, because her father had a particular way of saying it's fine that communicated the conversation was closed.

He closed the folder when she came in. The motion was smooth. It might have looked accidental.

He looked up at her, and his face did the thing it always did - settled, relaxed, became something softer. "There she is."

"Here I am." She pulled out the chair across from him and sat. "How's the bank?"

"Fine."

She held his gaze for one beat longer than she usually would.

"Dad." Careful, even. "Is it actually fine?"

Something shifted in his expression - not alarm, but awareness. He looked at her for a moment the way he sometimes did when she surprised him, then picked up his reading glasses from the table and turned them in his hands. She had watched him do that her whole life. It meant he was deciding how much to say.