The Fortune Teller

There was a woman in a market town who read futures, and she was honest, which nearly ruined her.
People came wanting the shape of the thing. Will the business hold. Will he come back. Will the child be well. She kept a glass ball on the table because they expected one, and told anyone who asked that it was decoration.
What she gave them was accurate and unpopular. She would listen for twenty minutes and then say something like: you already know he is not coming back, and you have known for a year, and what you want from me is permission to stop waiting.
She was right most of the time. That was the problem. Being told the truth by a stranger is only slightly more welcome than being told it by a relative.

Her business survived on a small, stubborn group who had gotten the honest answer, hated it, and come back anyway.
One of them, a man who had come three times in eleven years, asked her near the end why anyone consults an oracle at all, given that the answers are usually things they already suspect.
She thought about it.
"Because they want the weight moved. Not the answer — the weight. If the stars say it, or fate says it, or a woman with a glass ball says it, then whatever happens next isn't theirs. They came to hand it over."
"And you won't take it."
"I can't take it. Nobody can. That's the only thing I've ever actually known, and it's the one thing nobody's willing to pay for."

The hardest news she ever delivered was not a death or a betrayal.
It was this: there is no reading. The ball is empty. It has always been empty. The hands holding this are yours.
People cried at that more than at anything else she told them. A few came back years later to say it was the only thing anyone had given them that they still used.

The Thread
Sartre says we are condemned to be free, and the word is deliberate. Not liberated — condemned. Freedom without an exit is weight. There is no authority to appeal to, no schedule already written, nobody who turns out to have been holding the answer.
He also names mauvaise foi, bad faith, the maneuver by which a person pretends the decision was not theirs. My role required it. My nature is like this. It was always going to happen. The oracle is the oldest technology for bad faith, and it works because the relief is real even when the reading is not.
Set against that: the Stoic dichotomy of control, which sounds similar and lands differently. Epictetus also says the externals are not yours — but he says it to hand you back the one thing that is, rather than to take everything away. Same wall. Opposite emotional weather. Both are honest.