Storm Vitamins

The bottle of vitamin D supplements sat on Maya's nightstand, a silent indictment of her attempt to optimize herself into happiness. She swallowed one dry, staring at the lightning flickering through her window like a nervous tic.

Three years ago, Elena had been her person—the kind of friend who shows up with wine when your marriage implodes, who holds your hair back when grief turns you into something unrecognizable. Then came the betrayal: Elena sleeping with Maya's ex-husband, citing timing and compatibility and other words that sound reasonable until they're happening to you.

Maya's dog, Buster, had been the collateral damage. The golden retriever had died two weeks after the divorce was final—old age, the vet said, but Maya knew better. Grief kills, even in canines.

Now, lightning struck again, literally this time. The transformer outside her building exploded, plunging her apartment into darkness. In the sudden quiet, her phone buzzed. Elena's name lit up the screen like a punchline.

"I'm sorry," the text read. "I can't not say it anymore."

Maya thought of her father, stubborn as a bull, who'd refused to speak to his own brother for twenty years over a loan. He'd died without reconciling, and Maya had sworn she wouldn't repeat that particular inheritance of pride.

But forgiveness isn't a vitamin you can just supplement into your system. Some wounds don't heal—they just scar over, thick and permanent.

The lightning flashed again, illuminating the empty space where Buster's bed used to be. Maya typed back: "I don't know if I can be the person who forgives you."

"You don't have to be," Elena replied. "But you could be the person who stops answering my texts with paragraphs I've already written in my head a thousand times."

Maya deleted the response she'd typed—something sharp and cutting—and simply wrote: "Coffee tomorrow."

Outside, the storm had passed. She swallowed another vitamin, swallowing pride alongside it, and watched as the darkness turned to gray, then to the possibility of morning.