Supplements and Regrets

The vitamin bottle sat on her kitchen counter, a daily reminder of everything she couldn't fix with a pill. Emma stared at it while her coffee brewed, thinking about how her mother used to line up her own army of supplements every morning, right until the cancer took her anyway.

Her phone buzzed. Mark.

She considered letting it go to voicemail. Their friendship had been circling the drain for months, ever since that night at the company holiday party when too much tequila and old resentments had collided. But Mark had been there through the divorce, through her mother's diagnosis, through the long terrifying months when she wasn't sure she'd keep her job.

"Emma," his voicemail began when she finally checked. "I'm at the hospital. Dad had a stroke."

The orange she'd been peeling for breakfast fell from her hand, rolling across the counter. Suddenly she was seventeen again, sitting at Mark's kitchen table while his father explained the fundamentals of baseball with the kind of patience her own father never had.

"He kept asking for you," Mark said when she called back. "Some memory about a Yankees game in '98. We were all there. Remember?"

She did remember. They'd sat in the nosebleeds with Mark's dad, eating overpriced hot dogs while he told them stories about his own father, who'd played in the minor leagues. That summer had felt infinite then.

Emma found the baseball cap in her closet—Yankees blue, stained from that day, barely worn since. She pulled it on, caught her reflection in the mirror. Thirty-six years old and still dressing like the lost girl who needed Mark's father to explain life to her.

The vitamin bottle was still on the counter when she left. Let them sit there. Some things you couldn't fix with pills or second chances. But you could show up. That had to count for something.