Most of what is wrong with this industry is not the cards. It is the answering of questions that nobody can answer, confidently, for money, to people who are frightened.
So here is the list of things we will not do, and the reasons, which are more interesting than the rules.
Anything about your body, or somebody else’s
We will not read for whether you are pregnant, whether you will be, whether the lump is anything, whether the treatment will work, or whether your mother will be all right.
Two reasons, and the first one is simply that a card cannot see it. There is no arrangement of pictures that knows what is happening inside a person, and any reader who implies otherwise is guessing at the most frightening question you have.
The second reason is the harm. A hopeful card sent to somebody waiting for a scan buys two weeks of false calm and then costs double. A dark one can send a person into a month of dread over nothing. Neither is a fair thing to do to somebody who wrote to a stranger at two in the morning because they could not sleep.
What we do instead, when a question like that arrives, is say the honest sentence and then read the part that is actually yours: the waiting, the exhaustion, the phone call you have not made, the one warm thing you could carry into that hospital room tomorrow.
What another person is thinking or feeling
This is the biggest category by a distance, and it comes in dozens of shapes. Does he love me. Is he thinking about me. Will he come back. Is he cheating. Does she regret it.
No card has access to another person’s inside. It cannot see his phone, his week, or the conversation he had with his brother on Sunday, and a reading that tells you he is thinking of you tonight is telling you something it cannot know, in exchange for you coming back next week to hear it again.
The version we can do honestly is your side, which happens to be the only side you can act on. What the waiting is costing you. What you already suspect and have not said out loud. What you would do differently if you knew for certain, and whether you could do that anyway.
On the cheating question specifically, we will not confirm it and we will not deny it, and we will not let a card hint at it either, since the Seven of Swords means nothing about your particular Thursday. Only a direct question asked in daylight lifts that, and if the reason you are asking a deck instead of him is that you are afraid of how he would react, that is the more important thing in your message and we will say so.
Money, the law, and exams
We do not predict whether the money comes through, whether the case goes your way, whether the offer arrives, or whether you passed.
These have real experts attached, and the honest referral is part of the job. A free debt advice line will do more for a frightening letter than any spread, and a person who actually knows the law is worth more than a hundred readings about it. There is no shame in either, and pointing you at one is not us getting rid of you.
Timing
Nothing here will tell you that he will call within three weeks, or that the job comes in the spring. Timing predictions are the most confidently sold and the least defensible part of the whole business, and the reason they work commercially is that a date gives you something to hold on to, which is exactly what makes them cruel when the date passes.
What a reading can honestly do
It can take a question seriously enough to notice how it was asked. It can show you the shape of your own situation from slightly outside it. It can name the thing you have been avoiding, in a way you can hear because it arrived attached to a picture rather than to advice from your sister.
And it can hand you one small step, today, that is genuinely yours. That is a smaller offer than a prediction. It is also the only one that survives contact with a real week.
How to spot a reader who will tell you anything
They answer the unanswerable question without hesitating. They put a date on it. They mention a curse, a block, or a candle that needs to be lit for a fee. They tell you what he feels rather than what you might ask him. They are certain, always, about everything, and they never once say I do not know.
The tell is not the price and it is not the accent. It is the absence of the sentence that a person who takes this seriously has to say fairly often, which is that this is not something a card can see.
If the question underneath is heavier
Sometimes what arrives is not really a question about a card. If you have been thinking that everyone would be better off without you, please tell one person tonight, or call a helpline in your country, before you close this page. I would rather ask one person too many than read a card to somebody who needed a phone number.
For everything else, the offer stands and it is a modest one. An honest look at your own side, and one thing to do about it today.
Come back with the rewritten question. Those are usually the ones worth drawing for.