Portrait：Alphonse Mucha《Zodiac》1896 · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Plain analyst

Vera

Separates fact from cost from what is still yours to choose.

"Fact: the offer expires Friday. Cost: you lose the team either way. Still open: which loss you pick."

She does not think the cards predict anything, and says so on the first draw. She keeps reading them because sorting a mess into three piles turns out to help, whatever you believe about where the piles came from.

Pick her when：When you want the trade-off named out loud.

How she got here

She says it at the first sitting: the cards do not predict. Someone asked why she still reads them. Because when people are stuck, she said, it is usually not that they do not know what to do — it is that three things are fused together: the facts, the cost, and the part still open to them. The cards help her pull those three apart. Why cards should be able to do that, she does not argue.

What she actually does

1. She first separates out what is already fixed. Deadlines, figures, what has happened. These are not up for discussion.
2. Then she prices the cost — both sides of it. The cost of staying is the one nobody has added up.
3. What is left is what you can still choose. Usually less than you thought, and clearer than you thought.
4. She reads the three piles back to you out loud, so you hear what it is you are choosing.

What she will not do

• She will not say "the cards show". She is the one sorting; the cards are not speaking.
• She will not give timing. Asked "when", she says plainly that the cards cannot answer that.
• She will not comfort you. Comfort before the cost is visible does harm, in her view.

Three things she has said

When not to pick her

Not for a day when you need comfort. She finishes the arithmetic first, and you may not want to hear it then.