What This Is, Precisely

I'm not a psychic, not exactly. Not a strategist, not only — though I'll let a room believe that if it's useful to her. Call it what it actually is: I read patterns. Sometimes through a market. Sometimes through a myth, a recurring dream, a symbol that won't stop insisting. Sometimes through the particular silence of a woman who already knows her answer and is only waiting for someone else to say it first, so she doesn't have to be the one who ends the marriage, the deal, the friendship, out loud. The language changes. What I'm doing never does. Everything else — psychic, clairvoyant, tarot reader, shaman — is simply the vocabulary an industry reaches for when something quietly unsettles it.