The Diamond We'll Never Touch

The vitamins sat in a neat weekly organizer on her nightstand — seven compartments of hope compressed into gelatin capsules. CoQ10 for egg quality, prenatal with folate, Vitamin D3 for the immune system she'd wrecked with three rounds of IVF. David didn't understand why she still took them. The marriage had dissolved months ago, somewhere between the negative pregnancy test and his confession about the baseball stadium incident — not that anything happened, but the fact that he'd felt something, anything, for someone else while she was injecting hormones into her stomach each night.

That morning, a fox appeared in their suburban driveway. A vixn, actually — lean, russet-furred, watching Elena with ancient amber eyes as she got the mail. Elena stood frozen, remembering how her mother had once told her that foxes were messengers. Of what, she'd never said. Maybe of endings. Maybe of the wildness that domesticity couldn't contain.

She'd wanted children the way some women want careers or recognition — as proof that she'd done something right with her life. Instead, she had this house, this dissolved marriage, these goddamn vitamins.

David had always loved baseball. Had wanted to take their hypothetical son to games, teach him to keep his eye on the ball. The metaphor wasn't lost on Elena — how American couples tethered their imagined futures to sports they'd stopped playing years ago. She'd found the ticket stubs from the game he attended alone last summer, the night he swore he was working late. He claimed nothing happened. Said he just needed to not be husband-father-project for a few hours.

The fox was still there, watching.

"What do you want?" Elena asked.

The fox's tail twitched. Then it turned and vanished between the houses, toward the park where children played baseball on Saturday mornings.

Elena went inside and flushed the vitamins down the toilet. She didn't know what came next — only that something wild and necessary had finally broken through.