"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.