Lightning in the Break Room

The vitamin supplements sat on my desk like a daily accusation—D3 for bone health, B-complex for stress, omega-3 for a heart that hadn't felt much lately. At forty-two, I'd become someone who organized pills into little plastic containers, color-coded by day.

Marcus leaned against my cubicle wall, eating papaya from a Tupperware container. The sweet tropical smell filled our gray corporate air like an intrusion from another world. We'd been friends since junior year, survived two layoffs together, shared secrets over countless coffees. But something had shifted since his promotion last month.

"The client meeting," he said, not meeting my eyes. "I told them you were still working on the backend integration."

I stared at him. "I finished it Tuesday. We talked about this."

He shrugged, swallowing a piece of fruit. "I needed to manage expectations. You know how they get."

The bull, our CEO, had been riding everyone hard since the earnings call. His famous temper—like lightning across the prairie, sudden and devastating—had claimed three senior managers this quarter. But Marcus wasn't protecting me. He was protecting himself, positioning me as the bottleneck, the reason timelines slipped.

Lightning struck outside, actual lightning, flooding the break room with harsh white light through the windows. In that moment, I saw it clearly: fifteen years of friendship reduced to office politics, to survival in a company that would replace us both without blinking.

"That's not what friends do," I said quietly.

Marcus finally looked at me, papaya juice on his chin. "It's just business, Elena. Don't make it weird."

I packed my vitamin bottles into my purse. Some things you can't supplement. Some deficiencies run deeper than blood tests can measure. As I walked out of that break room, the storm outside didn't seem so threatening anymore. Lightning, after all, just clears the air.