Touching wood, lucky charms, none of it will help you see the car you never saw coming, or avoid the tumor you didn’t realize you had. It was what she wanted to shout at clients, at the ones who came back again and again looking for answers that she could not give.

But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt. You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. You can’t predict the future, Hal, her mother had reminded her, time and time again. False promises, designed to give the illusion of control and meaning in a world in which the only destiny came from yourself. Touching wood, crossing fingers, counting magpies-they were lies, all of them. Because superstition was a trap-that was what she had learned, in the years of plying her trade on the pier. When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.” The people who came to her booth were seeking meaning and control-but they were looking in the wrong place.

For in that moment that you turn your head to look for the second magpie, in the hope of changing your fortune from sorrow to joy-that’s when you take your attention away from the things you can change, the crossing light, the speeding car, the moment you should have turned back.

Ruth ware the death of mrs westaway