I have to stay in contact with someone w

The cards don't say cut them off — they say the position you're already holding is defensible, but the way you keep holding it is the thing that will harden.

Past — Judgement, upright. This was already settled once, in your own reckoning, and you're not wrong about it. What drains you isn't a new development; it's a verdict you reached earlier and have kept re-litigating at full volume every time they write.

Present — Nine of Wands, upright. You are on your feet, wounded but standing, guard up. This is the card of holding a line under pressure — it means the contact is survivable, not that it is free. What costs you is the stance: braced, watchful, braced again. The Nine of Wands protects the position, not the person holding it.

Future — Knight of Pentacles, reversed. If you keep meeting them at the same reliable pace — always answer, always show up, always be the steady one — this card says that steadiness curdles into inertia. It becomes the arrangement that never gets renegotiated because it never gets named. Not catastrophe: erosion.

The turn: one Major plus fire-and-earth in play means this is a structural question about how the contact is run, not a mood you'll ride out. Upright outnumbers reversed here, so the energy is available to you — the defence is real, and the only thing that isn't working is the silence around it.

So, conditional: if you say plainly what you can give and what you won't, and they meet it — the Nine of Wands holds and your week gets its hours back. If the limit goes unspoken, or gets absorbed and the next contact stretches to two hours anyway — that's the reversed Knight landing, and the arrangement settles into a routine neither of you ever agreed to.

One line, not a speech. Before your next reply from them, write down the specific window you can give and the one thing you won't do, keep it where you can read it before you answer — then see what their next message does with it. What comes back is their actual signal about the limit, which no card can hand you.

Want the three cards as a picture, or this saved to your journal?