The Last Vitamin

Marcus stood at the kitchen counter at 2 AM, staring at the orange plastic bottle. Vitamin D3, the label read. For bone health, immune support. The same bottle Elena had bought him three months ago, before she told him she'd been seeing someone else. Before she moved out while he was at work, leaving only her half of the **cable** bill unpaid and a note about needing time to figure things out.

He'd thought she was his best **friend**. That's what she'd called him, eyes wet with those convincingly genuine tears, sitting on their bed in that gentrified studio apartment they couldn't afford. We're friends first, Marcus. Friends who love each other. The words had felt like something soft suffocating him.

Now he grabbed his keys and drove to the 24-hour court. The **padel** match with Diego was at three. Diego didn't know about Elena. Diego thought Marcus had been working late, which was technically true—he'd been throwing himself into that mergers and acquisitions deal like a man trying to drown.

The court lights buzzed with that electric hum that sounds like silence is being manufactured. Diego was already there, stretching, looking annoyingly well-rested.

"You look like shit," Diego said, which is what friends say instead of I'm worried about you.

"Rough night."

"Your serve."

They played. Marcus hit the ball hard, every smash feeling like something he should have said but didn't. Elena had been like a **bull** in the way she lived—forceful, direct, incapable of subtlety. That's what he'd loved about her. That's what he'd hated. She'd told him she was leaving the same way she'd told him she loved him: abruptly, absolutely, as if her certainty made it immutable.

"You're overthinking," Diego called from across the court. "Hit the damn ball."

Marcus missed. The ball bounced against the glass wall, the sound echoing in the empty space.

"I asked her to marry me," he said, his voice sounding foreign to his own ears. "Three weeks ago. She said she needed time."

Diego stopped. "And now?"

"Now she's with him. The friend from college. The one she said was like a brother."

Diego walked to the net. "Shit, Marcus."

"I'm thirty-five, Diego. I don't have time for this. For starting over. For meeting someone who's going to look at me in five years and tell me I'm not enough."

"You need to sleep."

"I need her not to be with him."

"That's not something you get."

They stood there as the automatic lights began to dim. Marcus thought about the vitamin bottle on his counter. How she'd researched which brand was best, which dosage, which absorption rate. She'd done that with everything. Made every decision feel like an act of care.

"I'm going to call her," he said.

Diego shook his head. "Don't."

"I have to. I need to know—"

"You know. That's the problem. You know and you can't stop knowing."

Marcus drove home as the city began to wake up. The orange bottle was still on the counter. He took two, though the label said one. Then he sat on the couch and turned on the TV, not because there was anything worth watching, but because the silence had become too loud to bear alone.