Spinach in the Bull's Eye

Margaret stood before the bathroom mirror at 2:00 AM, extracting a piece of spinach from between her front teeth. Three hours until the presentation. Three hours until she'd stand in front of the executive board and defend the pyramid scheme she'd helped build—not the illegal kind, but the corporate variety where she crushed everyone beneath her to reach the C-suite.

Her husband David was probably asleep. Or maybe he was awake, thinking about how they'd become strangers sharing a king-sized bed. She'd been riding the bull market of mergers and acquisitions for fifteen years, hoarding prestige like it was water in a drought. Now she was drowning in it.

The dog, Buster, scratched at the bathroom door. David's rescue. The dog hated her, always had, sensing something predatory beneath her power suits. She let him in. He sat beside the toilet, watching her with ancient, judgmental eyes.

"You know," she whispered to him, "I used to be someone who believed in things."

Buster thumped his tail once, a dismissive punctuation mark.

Her phone buzzed. A message from her boss: We need to discuss tomorrow's numbers. Before the meeting.

Her stomach turned. The spinach had been easy to remove. The ethical compromises that had accumulated like plaque over two decades—that was the real decay. She thought about the junior analysts she'd steamrolled, the rumors she'd spread, the sleeping pills she'd pretended not to notice in her assistant's desk drawer.

Margaret washed her hands with expensive soap that smelled like false confidence. The pyramid needed a capstone, and she was it. She'd built her life on the backs of others, climbing higher while the foundation crumbled beneath.

She sat on the edge of the bathtub, suddenly exhausted. Buster rested his head on her knee. For the first time in years, she didn't push him away.

The board meeting was in three hours. She could march in there with her charts and graphs, secure in her bull-headed determination to win. Or she could finally tell the truth.

Margaret stood up, wiped her eyes, and reached for her phone. Deleted the message. She wasn't going to the meeting. She was going to make coffee and feed the dog and maybe, just maybe, figure out who she was before she became the person who needed to be.