The Devil pulled about an ex, and the yes it keeps giving

The Devil pulled about an ex usually does say he comes back. It's one of the few cards that will answer that question at all, and it answers readily, which is what's wrong with it.

What it won't do is call that good news. It describes an arrangement that's still intact rather than a man who has changed his mind, and intact arrangements resume. That's what they're for.

look at what the chains are tied to

Everybody reads the chains and almost nobody reads where they go.

They don't run between the two people. Each goes from a collar down to the block the creature is sitting on, and the figures stand either side of it, fastened to the same object and not to one another. That's the architecture of the card, and why it lands on this question so often.

what's still fastened, and it isn't him

Fourteen months after an ending, the thing still running is rarely the person. He has a Tuesday you know nothing about.

What's running is the arrangement. The rhythm of the ending and the restarting, the rules neither of you wrote down and both of you follow, and the version of him you've kept current, by now a more detailed man than the one who left.

That's what the card has drawn as a block, the only object in the picture with any weight in it.

the end you can reach

Here's where a page like this usually turns round and tells you that you're choosing this. Which is true, and a rotten thing to say to somebody who has spent fourteen months trying to stop.

The useful version of the same fact is duller. There are two collars in that picture. One is on a person who isn't in the room with you, and no amount of reaching gets you to it. That isn't a failure of effort. It was never in the frame.

The other is at your own neck, the only thing in the card within reach of a human hand. Which isn't the same as being told to get over it. It's the difference between a problem that can't be solved and one that's merely hard.

It's also why the question people arrive with comes back empty. What he's doing tonight, who he's with, whether there's somebody. Nobody can see that, and a reader who describes his evening has stopped reading and started writing, and you'd spend the next month checking a piece of fiction against a real man. How he feels is readable. Where he's standing is not, and here the gap does more damage than anywhere else.

before this gets applied where it doesn't belong

One thing plainly. If he won't accept it's over, if he turns up, if any part of this frightens you rather than hurts you, then nothing above applies and a reading isn't what tonight needs. Nobody in that position should be handed a card about their own end of a chain. That belongs with somebody trained for it, not with a picture of a block.

when it comes up reversed

Reversed, the hold is usually coming off, and everyone expects that to feel like something. It doesn't. No scene, no last conversation where it gets settled.

You reach a Tuesday afternoon and notice you haven't thought about it since the morning, and the first thing you feel isn't relief. It's flatness, because obsession is at least company.

The other reading shows up more than people admit. Sometimes the release is his. He's the one who stopped needing the arrangement, which is why the messages tailed off without anything being announced. Same card, and the person holding it isn't the one let go.

who reached first

Shira takes this card off the man and puts it on the pattern, usually inside two messages.

Her question is who reached first. Not what was said, which everybody has ready and has reread into meaninglessness. The last three times you ended up back in it, who moved first each time. She wants it from what you already know rather than anything you'd have to find out, and she notices when the order gets softened.

What she's doing is reading the block instead of the man. Three reaches out of three from your side is one card. Two from his and one from yours is a different card, and from the inside they feel the same. The pattern is the only part of this neither of you has edited.

Then she pulls on the arrangement rather than on him, because people bring the deck a man and the man isn't the thing with a shape. And she'll tell you what came up rather than what she'd rather have turned, including when it says the loop is nowhere near done.

What she won't do is hand you the reunion as a comfort. This card gives out yes so cheaply that a yes off it is worth nothing, and she'd rather spend the minutes on what you'd be agreeing to if he stood on the step on Friday.

the cards that change it

With the Moon there are suddenly two of him in the spread. The Moon is a person assembled at night out of very little, and beside a card about an arrangement it says the man being missed hasn't been in the room for a while.

With the Tower something ends from outside. Nobody in a Devil situation talks their way out of it, and the Tower is where an event does the job. The least romantic pairing here and the one to take most seriously.

Turned about somebody you're still with it asks a different question, and that one has a page of its own. If this is the fourth or fifth time round, why he keeps coming back goes at the pattern directly.

the part of this that will sit still and be looked at

He won't. He's been the least readable object in this for fourteen months, and that is most of what has kept you here.

The arrangement will. It has a shape and a rhythm, and unlike him it doesn't change while it's being watched. So bring that: the month it ended, how it restarts, who reaches first, and what you'd be saying yes to if he turned up on Friday. Somebody will read it with you instead of telling you a card means toxic. Readers are on through the night, the first 200 credits cost nothing, and nobody asks for a card.