The Last Vitamin

The bottle sat on her nightstand for six months after Marcus died — a generic multivitamin with his careful, pharmacist's handwriting on the lid: 'Take with breakfast, M.' Elena had never taken it. She didn't believe in supplements. Marcus had. He believed in prevention, in maintenance, in staying ahead of the body's inevitable decay.

When Sarah, her oldest friend, finally came over to help pack up Marcus's things, she found the bottle in the bathroom cabinet. Behind it, rows of others. Vitamin D, B-complex, zinc, magnesium. All expired, all untouched.

"He never told you," Sarah said, her voice flat.

Elena stared. "Told me what?"

"That he was sick. These aren't maintenance vitamins, El. These are treatment doses."

The cat, Luna, who had slept at Marcus's feet every night for seven years, jumped onto the counter and sniffed the bottles. Then she looked at Elena with that unforgiving feline gaze, as if to say: You lived with him. You slept beside him. How did you not know?

Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it. The silence stretched, heavy with all the things she'd kept hidden. Elena had thought Sarah knew everything. Hadn't they been friends since college, surviving three marriages between them, countless heartbreaks, the slow erosion of their dreams?

"How long?" Elena asked.

"Two years. He made me promise."

The betrayal didn't come from Marcus, who had died wanting to protect her from grief before it arrived. It came from Sarah, who had chosen loyalty to a dead man over honesty with her living friend. Luna rubbed against Elena's arm, purring, indifferent to human complications. The cat's warm body was the only real thing in the room.

Elena took the vitamin bottle from Sarah's hand. 'Take with breakfast, M.' She opened it, shook a pill into her palm, and swallowed it dry. It was the first thing of Marcus's she had taken.