Severance

The prenatal vitamins sat on her desk like accusation, a daily reminder of what Marcus wanted and she couldn't give. Elena swallowed them anyway, a ritual of appeasement in a marriage that had become a series of transactions.

That's when the orange envelope appeared — HR's color choice for termination notices, bright as a traffic warning, impossible to miss. Inside, the cable management diagram for the network upgrade she'd been planning for six months. But the project lead name wasn't hers anymore.

It was Jessica's.

Jessica, twenty-six, with her impeccable skin and infectious laugh and the way Marcus looked at her at the Christmas party. Jessica, who probably didn't need vitamins to convince her body to do basic biological functions.

Elena traced the cable pathways on the diagram with her fingernail, hard enough to tear the paper. Fiber optic runs, server migrations, the infrastructure she'd designed piece by piece over three years. Now someone else would plug in the cables, someone else would get the credit when the new network hummed to life.

Marcus called from the car dealer. "Got the orange one," he said, proud as if he'd built it himself. "Come outside, see what you think."

She walked to the window. Below, her husband stood beside a sports car the color of a traffic cone, grinning up at their building. He couldn't see her through the glass, but he waved anyway, confident that she was watching, that she would share his excitement.

Behind her, the email pinged. Meeting with HR at 3:00 PM.

Elena opened her desk drawer and swept the vitamins into the trash. Then she did something she'd never done in twelve years of marriage — she didn't go downstairs to see what Marcus had bought. Instead, she sat at her desk, opened the severance agreement she knew was coming, and began to read.

The car horn honked once, then again. Outside, the orange sat gleaming in the afternoon sun, a bright new toy for a man who'd already replaced everything else that mattered.