Supplements and Storms

Sarah arranged the vitamins in their weekly organizer—Sunday through Saturday, a perfect little pharmacy of hope. At forty-seven, she'd started measuring her life in supplements: calcium for bones that might ache, vitamin D for winters that stretched too long, omega-3s for a heart that still hadn't completely healed.

"You're doing that thing," Marcus said from the kitchen doorway.

"What thing?"

"The organizing. Like if you make everything neat, the rest of it will work itself out."

She snapped the plastic lid shut. The sound was sharp as a bone breaking.

Marcus held an orange in each hand, as if weighing some cosmic choice. His shirt was stained with grease from the garage where he spent most evenings now, fixing cars that weren't his, avoiding a house that had become too quiet.

"I'm going to stay with my sister," he said.

The words hit like lightning—sudden, illuminating everything, gone before she could fully process the flash. Outside, actual lightning forked across the sky, a cliché so perfect she almost laughed. Almost.

"For how long?"

"I don't know, Sarah. That's the problem."

He peeled one of the oranges, the citrus scent cutting through the stale air of their marriage. Rain began to hammer against the windows, nature's dramatic timing. She thought about how they'd met during a thunderstorm twenty-three years ago, how she'd thought his broken umbrella was charming, how the world had seemed electric then, full of possibility.

Now there were just the vitamins and the oranges and the lightning and the terrible, quiet understanding that some things, once broken, couldn't be fixed—not with supplements or hope or love.

"Take your vitamins," she said instead of asking him to stay. "For your sister's sake."

Marcus looked at her for a long moment, then popped a vitamin C tablet into his mouth. The first thing he'd taken from her in months.

"Goodbye, Sarah."

The door clicked shut. She stood alone in the kitchen, surrounded by the orderly evidence of a life she'd tried so hard to keep healthy, watching the lightning illuminate the empty space where her husband had just stood.