The Last Supplement

Elena stared at the orange plastic bottle. Prenatal vitamins. Three years of swallowing them every morning with her coffee, hoping her body would cooperate with her heart's desire. At forty-two, the hope had grown thin as parchment.

"You're still taking those?" Marcus asked, not looking up from his laptop. His tone carried that familiar edge—the subtle impatience that had been creping into his voice like a slow-growing stain.

"Yes, Marcus. I'm still taking them."

She walked to the window and saw it—a fox darting between the parked cars, its russet coat bright against the gray suburban street. She watched it slip through a gap in the neighbor's fence, wild and unburdened. Free.

The cable guy was coming today. Marcus had arranged it—he worked in telecommunications now, some vague corporate role that required long hours and encrypted calls. She'd stopped asking details.

The technician arrived at noon. Young, with nervous hands and eyes that kept sliding toward the closed door of Marcus's home office.

"Ma'am, I need to check the line in there," he said. "There's a signal bleed. Someone's been siphoning data."

Elena opened Marcus's office door. The room smelled like him—sandalwood soap and that metallic, electric scent of overheated electronics. And something else. Perfume. Not hers.

She watched the technician work. He pulled aside the desk, tracing the cable connection to the wall. Then he froze.

"Ma'am... this isn't a standard setup. This is a tap. Your husband's been spying on someone. Corporate espionage, maybe. But there's also—" He held up a small device. "This is a counter-surveillance bug. Someone's spying on him too."

The fox appeared again in the window, watching her with amber eyes.

"Or her," Elena said softly. "Her, right?"

The technician's face flushed. "I shouldn't—look, your husband's been running an intelligence operation from your home. That's all I can say."

She paid him. He left quickly.

Elena sat at Marcus's desk and opened his laptop. Password protected, of course. But she knew him—their anniversary, backward. The files appeared: contracts, wire transfers, a dossier on a rival executive. And emails. Hundreds of them with someone named 'V.'

She picked up her phone and called Marcus's office. His assistant answered: "He's in a meeting, Mrs. Caldwell."

"No," Elena said. "He's not."

She opened the vitamin bottle and poured the contents into the trash. Then she packed a bag. The fox was still outside, waiting.

"You're clever," she whispered to it. "You know when to leave."

She walked out the door, leaving her keys on the counter. Some stories don't have endings—they just have moments when you finally stop lying to yourself.