The Tower for an ex, and the ending it is describing

The Tower pulled about somebody who has gone is usually not answering the question you asked. You asked about return. It has described the ending. That sounds like a dodge and it is the most useful thing anybody can tell you tonight, because it moves the reading off a future nobody can see and onto something you were present for. This is the card of the ending that came with nothing in front of it, or with signs that were there and unreadable at the time. It is not a return card, and nobody honest will turn it into one for you.

both of the figures are falling

Look at the people rather than the building.

There are two of them and both are in the air. Nobody is at a window watching, nobody has been pushed, and the picture will not say which of them was nearer the door.

Then the windows. The flames come out of them, which puts the fire inside the building before the lightning arrived. That is not the same as saying you should have known. A thing can be inside a house and invisible from the street.

And the picture stops. Both figures are still falling when the card ends. No ground, no aftermath, nobody getting up. Whatever you get told about what comes next did not come from here.

the ending it is describing

Two versions of this ending exist, and most people live in one without knowing there is another.

In the first there was genuinely nothing. No signs, an ordinary Saturday and then a conversation on the Tuesday. People say it came out of nowhere and get told gently that it never does. Under this card, sometimes it does. The strike arrives from outside the frame, which is the deck saying that some endings are caused by something that was never in your half of the house.

In the second the signs were there and unreadable from inside. He stopped saying it back. He went quiet on Sundays. You registered every one and gave each a reason, and the reasons were reasonable. That is the fire in the windows.

Most endings are both. What neither supports is running the last conversation over looking for the hinge in it. There is no hinge in a lightning strike.

on whether he comes back, and what this card cannot see

The straight answer is that it does not speak to return, and any read that gets one out of it has been pushed.

It reports on a structure, and structures have no intentions. People do come back after a Tower ending, and when they do it has nothing to do with this pull, because the card was describing something that had already happened.

Which is also why it is useless for what you most want. Where he is tonight, who he is with, whether he thinks about you at four in the morning. Point a report on a collapse at his Friday and there is nothing in it, because the only people in the image are the two who fell. A reader who answers anyway is composing, and what gets composed is a real person you then treat differently for a year.

reversed, when the fall keeps being postponed

Reversed on an ex is usually not a softer version.

Most often it is an ending being held off: the pattern that has broken up three times and reassembled every time, where the roof comes off and goes back on and nobody finishes the sentence. One collapse, paid for in instalments.

Sometimes it is the opposite and much better news. The fall happened, the ground has been reached, and you are still braced for a strike out of a sky that cleared months ago. That turns up a lot around the year mark, and bracing costs something.

the ordinary week before it happened

Shira does not start this one at the ending, which is where everybody hands it to her.

She asks for the week before it, deliberately the boring one. What was bought, what was booked, what the two of you had planned for a month that never came. Those small forward-facing objects tell you whether the building saw it coming. A holiday paid for in October. A boiler service booked for January. She takes them as evidence of what he thought was happening on the Saturday, which is a different thing from what he had decided by the Tuesday.

Then the harder half, and she is careful with it, because it is the question people use to prosecute themselves. Was there anything you noticed and put back down. She wants one thing rather than a list, in the plain form it arrived in, and she reads it against the flames rather than against you. Inside the building, not visible from the street.

When she pulls a second card here it goes on top of the Tower and it is about you rather than him, which is the part people remember. She would sooner spend the credits on the eleven months than on a man's next move, and she will not hand over a reunion to be kind.

the cards it lands beside

With the Five of Cups the grief is being read from the wrong side. Three cups down, two still standing behind the figure, and nobody in that picture has turned round yet.

With the Eight of Cups the leaving was chosen rather than done to you, which usually means the story you carry about a man who blew everything up needs another look.

Pulled about a relationship still going on, this card asks a different question, on its own page. If return is what you want put to somebody, there is a page for that.

the one thing it genuinely offers

Here is the whole of what this card offers, and it is smaller than what you came for.

There is no building left to keep standing. Nobody is up there working out which floors still take weight, or what can be said at Christmas. That job is over, and it ended without asking you, which is why it does not feel like relief yet.

A fact about ground rather than a promise about him, and true, which a promise would not have been.

So bring the ordinary week and the thing you noticed and put down. Say it to a reader rather than to the deck, which will only repeat itself. Somebody is on now, and the first 200 credits are free, no card.