Supplements & Silences

The vitamin bottle sat on her nightstand, a promise she kept breaking. D3, the doctor said. For the bones, for the mood, for the slow creep north of forty that she couldn't quite accept. Claire watched Marc dress in the half-light, his silhouette familiar and suddenly foreign.

He checked his iPhone, the screen illuminating his face in that pale blue glow that had become the third partner in their marriage. "Working late," he murmured, the same phrase he'd used three times that week.

Their cat, Barnaby, wound around her ankles, purring with the demanding affection of something who knew he was about to be abandoned again. She picked him up, burying her face in his fur. At least someone still needed her.

"You should come to dinner with Sarah," Marc said, already halfway out the door. "She says she hasn't seen you in months." The word hung in the air like ash. Friend. That's what Sarah was now—a category shrinking by the year.

Later, she found herself at the edge of the Preserve, walking the path where they'd once seen a fox, sleek and improbable, slipping through the suburban dark like a secret. That was three years ago, back when they still held hands walking back to the car. She remembered the flash of russet fur, the way the creature had paused, watching them with intelligent eyes before vanishing into the ravine.

Something wild, something untamed.

The vitamin was still on her nightstand when she returned. Marc was already asleep, his phone dark on his chest. She thought about the fox, how it moved through the world on its own terms, how it didn't need anyone's permission to exist.

Claire opened the bottle, swallowed a pill dry. Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she'd call Sarah. Tomorrow she'd start again. But as she curled around herself in the bed they shared, she knew the truth: she was waiting for her own life to begin, watching her marriage dissolve not in dramatic explosions but in the slow erosion of unanswered texts, in vitamins forgotten, in the absence of wild things.