Running on Empty

The **vitamin** D deficiency showed up in Marcus's bloodwork the same week our marriage started dying. Not that I knew it then. I just thought he was tired all the time.

We'd been **running** together every morning since before we got married — three miles along the harbor loop, my pace slowing each year as his got faster. Some mornings I'd watch him pull ahead, his silhouette against the sunrise like he was already halfway gone.

"You're not eating right," he told me that Tuesday, pushing a bowl toward me across the kitchen island. Fresh **spinach**, wilting in the heat. "You need greens. You need to take care of yourself."

I stared at the spinach. I'd been making him smoothies with spinach for three years. I'd been packing his gym bag, scheduling his dentist appointments, tracking his **vitamin** supplements on the shared calendar I'd set up when his mother died and he forgot to take anything for a month.

"We're playing **padel** with the Jenkinses Friday," he said, not looking at me. "You should come."

I hadn't been invited to **padel** in six months. Not since the night I'd drunk too much at the club and told everyone how Marcus's promotion meant he'd missed our anniversary. He'd said I was embarrassing. He'd said I needed to get a hobby, something besides waiting for him to come home.

The spinach sat there, growing warm.

"I'm not going," I said.

His fork paused. "What?"

"I'm not going to **padel**. And I'm not eating the spinach."

He looked up then, really looked at me, and I saw it — the moment he realized I'd been **running** away too. Not behind him, but away. Away from the marriage, away from the person I'd become in the shadow of his expectations.

The bloodwork came back the next day. **Vitamin** D deficiency. Low iron. The doctor told him he'd been neglecting himself.

He came home that evening holding the results like a confession, and I finally understood: I hadn't been the only one starving all along.