The Daily Dose

Elena had been taking the same vitamin D supplement every morning for three years—3,000 IU, softgel, with breakfast. It was the one constant in her life since the divorce. Until the Tuesday she found the bottle empty.

"I picked up more," Marcus said, sliding a new bottle across her kitchen table. They'd been friends for six years, since they met in that disastrous graduate seminar on postcolonial literature. He was the person she called at 2 AM when her mind spun into familiar dark patterns.

But something was off. The new bottle had already been opened. Two capsules missing.

Then she noticed his phone face up on the table—notifications visible. Her therapist's name. Her pharmacy. A mental health triage line.

"You're checking on me."

Marcus didn't deny it. "You stopped posting. Stopped responding to texts for days at a time. I got worried."

"So you what? Called my doctor? My pharmacy?"

"I told them I was your brother. Asked if you'd picked up your antidepressants."

The vitamin in her hand suddenly felt like a stone.

"That's not friendship, Marcus. That's surveillance."

"We don't live in a world where friendship means letting people disappear, El." His voice cracked. "Three months ago, you wrote that post—the one about how the days were bleeding together. Then you went silent. What was I supposed to do?"

The question hung between them. Elena thought about all the times she'd praised him for being observant, for noticing the small shifts in her mood that others missed. She'd called it care. Now she called it intrusion.

But worse—she realized she'd let him. Had cultivated his concern, even relied on it. She'd made him responsible in ways that weren't fair, that blurred boundaries until they barely existed.

"You could have called," she said quietly.

"And heard you say you're fine when you're not?"

He was right. That was the devastating part.

Marcus stood to leave. "I won't do it again. But El—I don't know how to be your friend and not care if you're okay."

The door clicked shut. Elena opened the vitamin bottle, swallowed one capsule with cold coffee. The routine remained. But something essential had shifted—she couldn't say whether it was the friendship or her own dependence on being monitored, being known, being saved despite herself.

Either way, she was alone now. Perhaps that was the point.