Market Watch

The vitamin regimen was Maya's last tether to control. A, D3, B-complex, Omega-3—precisely 8:00 AM with breakfast, even as her marriage dissolved around her. Stephen called them her little optimism pills.

"You're swimming in it," he'd said last night, not unkindly, gesturing at the tsunami of stock tickers across her monitors. "Just drowning." She'd wanted to slap him. Instead she'd said, "It's a bull market, Stephen. People make money." She'd made seven figures last year. What she hadn't made was love.

Now, at 4:00 AM, the Asian markets were bleeding red. The bear had arrived, teeth bared, and Maya's stomach churned with that familiar metallic taste. She swallowed another vitamin with lukewarm coffee. Her phone buzzed—Stephen's monthly alimony payment, scheduled like clockwork. He'd always been disciplined.

She stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of her penthouse, thirty-seven stories up, watching the city sleep. Below, the Hudson glittered like spilled mercury. She remembered swimming there once, drunk, after her first big bonus. How alive she'd felt, suspended in that cold dark water, young and immortal and rich.

Now she was forty-two, and the money meant nothing. She felt like a zombie, something that should have died but kept moving, fed by green numbers and adrenaline. She'd forgotten how to want things that couldn't be quantified.

The screen flashed—a client's portfolio evaporating in real time. She should have cared. Instead, she opened the drawer where she kept her swimsuit from that night twenty years ago. It still fit.

The doorman found her at dawn, shoes by the river, staring at the water like it might answer something. He called Stephen. He came, and she let him hold her freezing hands, and for the first time in years, she didn't check the market.