The Bear in the Mirror

Margot had always been the fox in their marriage—clever, adaptable, never quite caught. David had admired that once, the way she could charm anyone, talk her way out of parking tickets, weave narratives that made their life glamorous. But lately, her cleverness felt like evasion.

The vitamin supplements sat on the kitchen counter in neat orange bottles. David had started taking them after his forty-fifth birthday, a quiet concession to mortality he refused to voice aloud. Margot called it "your little ritual," as if seeking health through capsules was precious rather than desperate.

"It's just baseball season," she'd said when he caught her texting late at night, phone illuminating her guilty expression.

David hadn't watched baseball in twenty years. The lie hung between them spoiled.

Now he stood in their bedroom, watching her pack. Outside, summer pressed against the windows, thick and humid, the kind that made old injuries ache. He felt like an old bear waking from hibernation, groggy and lumbering toward a confrontation his body wasn't built for.

"How long?" he asked.

"Does it matter?" She folded a silk blouse with precision.

"Since the vitamins? Since my cholesterol—"

"This isn't about you getting older." She finally looked at him. "It's about me feeling like I've been playing a game I signed up for at twenty-two, and now I'm forty and the rules don't make sense anymore."

Outside, someone hit a baseball against a metal bat—a sharp crack that echoed through the suburban silence. The sound took David back to college, to being young and strong enough to run forever.

"Where will you go?"

"Vermont." She zipped the suitcase. "I'll send for the rest."

"And the vitamins?"

"They're yours, David. You need them more."

She left without touching him, and that was the cruelest part. The fox had finally slipped the trap.

That night, David swallowed his pills with warm tap water, standing where he'd first proposed. The orange bottles cast long shadows. He'd thought they were building something permanent. But everything was temporary—health, love, the sharp crack of a bat, the quick cleverness that made you think you'd outsmarted time.

The bear in the mirror looked older than he had that morning.