Market corrections

The bull market had carried Marcus for fifteen years, lifting him from a junior analyst to the corner office he now sat in, surrounded by charts that screamed trouble he'd refused to see. His steak was medium-rare, exactly as he always ordered at The Oak Room, where he and Elena had celebrated every major milestone—first bonus, first house, their tenth anniversary.

"I'm not saying I want a divorce," she'd told him that morning, her voice calibrated the way she calibrated everything. "I'm saying I've already filed the papers."

Outside, lightning fractured the sky, sudden and terrible. The restaurant's floor-to-ceiling windows brightened with each strike, illuminating Marcus's half-eaked meal, the second martini he'd ordered to steady himself, the hollow feeling that had been growing inside him for years.

The waiter appeared with his side of spinach creamed with garlic, something Elena used to make whenever either of them felt unmoored. Spinach had been her comfort food, a childhood remedy her mother swore could fix anything from broken hearts to broken spirits. Marcus had laughed about it then, called it peasant magic. He wasn't laughing now.

His phone buzzed—his assistant. The fund was down another four percent. Margin calls were mounting. The bull was dead, and Marcus had ridden it straight off a cliff.

He thought of their daughter, seventeen and furious at both of them, her hair dyed orange last month as rebellion, then bleached platinum the next. Neither Marcus nor Elena had noticed. They'd been too busy being successful, too busy building a life they'd forgotten to actually live.

The spinach arrived, steaming and fragrant. Marcus took a bite, closed his eyes. It tasted exactly like desperation felt.

Maybe this was what happened when you spent decades chasing numbers that weren't real, playing a game that rewarded ruthlessness and called it strength. You ended up alone in a restaurant you couldn't afford anymore, eating food that reminded you of everything you'd lost, watching lightning tear apart the sky like the universe was finally telling you what you should have known all along.

Marcus signaled for the check. Some things, you couldn't fix. Some things, you finally had to feel.