Supplements

Sarah stood at the bathroom counter, sorting her daily pills into that plastic organizer with days of the week stamped into each compartment. The vitamin bottle was nearly empty—we'd bought it together last month during one of those Sunday errands couples do when they're trying to build a life. "Stay healthy," she'd said, dropping it into the basket alongside milk and bread. Now those words felt like prophecy, or maybe warning.

The spy business had started small. Passwords changed. Deleted texts. Her phone always facedown on the nightstand, never buzzing until I'd fallen asleep. I told myself I was being paranoid. But three months of waking at 3 AM to check if she'd come home will turn anyone into something they never intended to become.

"Going to the baseball game," she announced one Tuesday morning, pulling on her windbreaker. The team hadn't made playoffs in five years. She didn't follow sports.

"Who with?"

"Work friends. You don't know them."

That's when it clicked: the spy business wasn't her job at the pharmaceutical company. It was her life. Our life.

I followed her. She parked near the stadium and walked in the opposite direction, toward the warehouse district where gentrification hadn't quite arrived yet. The vitamin deficiency hadn't been imaginary; her pallor, the fatigue, the way she'd started sleeping in the guest room claiming insomnia. But what she was actually taking wasn't in any pharmacy.

She entered a walk-up with a futon on the floor and boxes stacked like walls. From across the street, hidden behind a dumpster that smelled of wet cardboard and cat piss, I watched. A man opened the door. Not a lover. The way they stood—awkward, formal, checking the street before closing up—said something else entirely.

I never learned his name. Never learned what they traded in those rooms. Information, probably. Her company had been under federal investigation for off-label marketing; maybe she was cooperating. Maybe she wasn't.

What I know: that night, she came home smelling of stale coffee and desperation. The baseball game had been rained out.

"Did you have fun?" I asked, pressing a vitamin into her palm. She looked at it, then at me, and something in her face settled. Resigned itself.

"You wouldn't understand," she said, and she was right.

The divorce papers came two months later. She didn't fight for the house. Didn't fight for anything. Sometimes I wonder if our whole marriage—those Sunday errands, the mortgage, the way she learned my coffee order—was just another cover, another alias she'd inhabited until the operation required something else.

I still take the vitamins every morning. They're the only thing left of the life we almost had.