The Absorption Rate

Mara stood in the supplement aisle, arranging the amber bottles of Vitamin D in neat rows. She'd worked here for three years, selling promises of better bones, brighter moods, stronger immunity. The irony wasn't lost on her—she couldn't absorb the one thing she actually needed.

Her husband, Daniel, had become a bear over the past decade. Not the cuddly kind. The hibernating kind. He'd retreat into his office for hours, emerging only to grunt at her questions about dinner or bills or when they might finally try for that baby they'd stopped discussing two years ago. She'd stopped waiting up.

"Excuse me, miss?"

She turned to find a man in his thirties holding a bottle of omega-3s like it was a sacred object. "These really work? For, you know, everything?"

Mara laughed—a genuine sound that surprised her. "Honey, if these fixed everything, I'd be swimming in them by the gallon."

His name was Ethan. They talked for twenty minutes about inflammation and heart health and somehow ended up at the bar across the street, where he admitted he was divorced and she admitted she was lonely in all the ways that mattered. He touched her hand and she didn't pull away.

But later, standing at her kitchen sink washing dishes, she watched the water spiral down the drain and felt sick. Daniel was upstairs asleep, his breathing heavy and familiar. She opened the cabinet and swallowed three vitamin tablets without water, letting them stick in her throat like penance.

Some things, she realized, couldn't be supplemented. You either absorbed them or you didn't. And she was tired of living on deficiencies.

The next morning, she left before Daniel woke up. She didn't leave a note. Some endings didn't require explanation—just the courage to stop trying to fix what had never been whole to begin with.