Supplements and Storms

The thunder rattled the windowpane as Elena counted out his vitamins. One D3, two Omega-3, a B-complex that promised energy he never seemed to have. The pill organizer's plastic compartments clicked like a clock marking time they'd both stopped noticing.

'You're doing that thing again,' Marcus said from the couch, eyes fixed on his iPhone. His thumb scrolled upward, an endless river of content he couldn't possibly be absorbing.

Elena's hands paused over the Tuesday slot. 'What thing?'

'The bull thing. Where you pretend everything's fine while you quietly dismantle us.' He finally looked up, and lightning flashed behind him, illuminating the harsh geometry of his face—the sharp jawline she'd once found so striking, now just familiar edges.

She set the vitamin bottle down with deliberate precision. 'I'm not dismantling anything. I'm organizing your supplements because you asked me to.'

'The supplements, Elena. That's what we're talking about? Not the fact that you haven't touched me in three weeks?'

The truth sat between them like a third person, silent and suffocating. She'd been withdrawing slowly, like a tide retreating before a tsunami. Not because she didn't love him—she did, with the dull, persistent ache of something you've carried too long—but because loving Marcus had become an exercise in diminishing returns. He was forty now, already halfway to wherever he was going, and she wasn't sure she was invited along for the ride.

His iPhone pinged with another notification. He didn't check it. Something in his expression had softened, maybe from the vitamin deficiency he was always reading about, or maybe from the realization that his wife was evaporating.

'Lightning,' she said, apropos of nothing, watching the sky fracture open outside. 'Do you know the odds of being struck?'

'Why are you—'

'One in a million. But someone has to be the one.' She pressed the pills into his palm, her fingers lingering on his skin for the first time in weeks. 'Take your vitamins, Marcus. We need you healthy for whatever comes next.'

The storm broke then, rain drumming against the roof like applause for a performance that had barely begun. He swallowed the pills without water, and in the brief silence between thunderclaps, they both understood: this wasn't an ending, but it wasn't quite a beginning either. It was the middle, messy and unresolved, and for the first time in years, that seemed like enough.