Reporter’s Notebook:

As a journalist, I must begin with a disclaimer: More than half the facts in the following story can’t be verified, and some might even be completely false.

But that’s the risk you take when you write about your own future.

Thursday morning, after years of nagging curiosity, I sat for a palm reading with Ruby Adams, a professional psychic in Costa Mesa. I’d had my palm read once before — by a girl in my 10th-grade English class who had no business license — and I wanted to give the official treatment a try.

In less than an hour, I learned that I’m destined for a long and happy marriage, that I’ll have a new home in the next few months, and that I may have been a war correspondent in one life. But more on that in a moment.

Adams, the owner of the Psychic Palm and Card Reader service, has been in the business of foretelling destiny for more than two decades. Her tiny stucco house on Harbor Boulevard gets a number of walk-ins and appointments every week, with customers choosing among Tarot cards, a single-palm reading, a double-palm reading or a regular psychic evaluation.

The office is open six days a week and charges $40 for a Tarot or psychic reading; palm readings are $20 for both hands and $10 for one.

I was eager to know what Adams would find in my palms, but I was just as curious to know how she came upon that line of work. I asked her how one becomes a psychic for a living. Her response was, simply, that there’s no diploma needed. Her family, she said, had a history of making spiritual predictions, and she had learned her craft from them.

“A psychic ability is something you cannot learn and train for,” she said. “A lot of people do have a sixth sense.”

During a consultation, Adams studies the lines on customers’ palms to determine a number of things about them. She calls the crease around the bottom of the thumb the “life line,” meaning that the longer it is, the longer its owner’s life will likely be. The wrinkles just below the little finger represent the number of loves in a person’s life — short ones indicate breakups or unrequited love, while a long one implies a lasting marriage.