The Last Healthy Thing

The bear market had finally caught up to Maya's career. Three years ago, she'd been riding high—equity shares, corner office, the kind of LinkedIn success that made old classmates silently hate her. Now, at forty-two, she was packing her desk into a cardboard box while HR's Teresa watched with practiced sympathy.

"You can keep the vitamin supplements," Teresa said, gesturing to the colorful array of bottles on Maya's windowsill. "Company policy—they just get thrown away anyway."

Maya hesitated. The vitamins were Javier's idea. He'd started leaving them on her desk six months ago—Vitamin D for her windowless office, B-complex for stress, magnesium for sleep. Each bottle a small admission that her corporate life was slowly killing her. She'd started taking them religiously after their first kiss in the server room, the way his hands had trembled against her waist like he was breaking some fundamental rule.

That was the other thing they'd find when they swept her desk. The printed cable bills from the hotel across town.

She took the vitamins.

Her last stop before leaving the building was the cafeteria. Dark, empty at 3 PM. She found herself standing at the salad bar, staring at the wilted spinach. This was it—the last healthy thing she'd do as an employee of this company. Not that it mattered. She'd been sleeping with a married man for eight months, lying to her best friend for nine, and hiding her mother's dementia from her siblings for a year. The spinach wasn't going to save her.

"Mind if I join you?"

Javier. Standing in the doorway with his own cardboard box. The cable repair bills had been his. The vitamins had been his. The marriage—his wife's idea of an open arrangement, or so he'd said, whispering it against her neck in hotel rooms that smelled like artificial lavender and desperation.

"I'm not hungry," she said.

"Me neither." He set his box down. "I hear bears are waking up early this year. Climate change or something."

She almost laughed. Instead, she walked past him, vitamins clutched in her hand like some pathetic talisman of wellness, like they could undo the damage, like she could still be the kind of person who believed small healthy choices mattered against the avalanche.

The automatic doors opened. Outside, the sky was that particular gray that makes you wonder why anyone bothers with anything at all. She took a vitamin D pill anyway.