Supplements

The orange prescription bottle sat on the counter between her coffee mug and his keys. Prenatal vitamins. The irony wasn't lost on either of them.

'You forgot again,' Marcus said, his voice flat. Not angry. Just tired. The kind of tired that accumulates like snow on a windowsill.

Sarah reached for the bottle, her fingers trembling slightly. 'I'll take them now.'

'They don't work retroactively, Sarah.' He picked up his keys. 'I'm going to the office.'

The door clicked shut. She stood alone in their kitchen, the morning light catching something in her peripheral vision.

Her hair was coming out in clumps now. She'd find it on her pillow, tangled in the shower drain, clinging to her sweaters. The doctor said it was temporary—hormonal fluctuations from the fertility treatments. But each strand felt like a small betrayal from her own body.

Barnaby, their cat, wound himself around her ankles, purring like a tiny engine. She'd found him as a stray three years ago, half-starved and missing an ear. Marcus hadn't wanted a pet. Too much responsibility, he'd said. She'd convinced him anyway, the same way she'd convinced herself that if they just tried harder, spent more money, endured more injections—somehow it would work.

She tipped two gel capsules from the bottle. Massive things. Fish oil and biotin and something else meant to help, meant to fix her, meant to make her into the kind of woman who could carry a pregnancy to term.

Barnaby leaped onto the counter and batted at the bottle, sending it spinning.

'Stop,' she whispered, but her voice cracked. She sank to the floor, the tiles cold against her legs, and buried her face in the cat's orange fur. He smelled like sunbeams and patience.

'I'm sorry,' she said to him, though she wasn't sure what she was apologizing for. The treatments. The marriage. The way she'd measured her worth in failed cycles and negative tests for so long that she'd forgotten how to be anything else.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. Marcus. Probably reminding her about the vitamin D supplements he'd researched. Always something to fix, some protocol to follow, as if grief were a problem with a solution.

She let it ring.

Barnaby licked her hand, his tongue rough and real. Outside, the morning continued without them. The sun kept rising. The world kept turning. And somewhere in the space between what she wanted and what was, Sarah finally exhaled.

She'd take the vitamins later. Or she wouldn't. For now, she scratched the cat behind his ears and listened to the only sound that felt honest: the rumble of a small, warm creature who didn't need her to be anything but present.