The Last Vitamin

Margaret stood before the bathroom mirror at 4:47 AM, the fluorescent light casting surgical shadows across her forty-seven-year-old face. She swallowed her vitamin C tablet with a gulp of lukewarm tap water—her first act of rebellion against the tumor growing inside her, or perhaps just another表演 in the theater of denial.

"Bear market," her analyst had said yesterday, his voice smooth and practiced. She'd wanted to slap him. Instead, she'd nodded, fingers instinctively adjusting the hem of her charcoal designer hat. In twelve years at Goldman & Black, she'd outfoxed every competitor, every Board challenge, every whisper of doubt about her gender, her age, her ruthless efficiency.

Now she stared at her phone. David had texted at 2:14 AM: "Can we talk?" Their affair had been three months of hotel bars and expensive dinners, both pretending this was anything other than two lonely people desperate to feel something.

The market opening bell would ring in three hours. Her team expected her usual bullish strategy—the aggressive acquisitions that had made her the highest-paid executive in the firm's history. But for the first time, she wondered whether the empire she'd built mattered at all.

She thought about her mother, dead at fifty-two from the same cancer Margaret now faced. "Don't end up like me," her mother had warned during those final months, wasting away in a sterile room that smelled of antiseptic and resignation.

Margaret applied her crimson lipstick, the only color in her monochrome apartment. The bull, the bear, the fox—she'd been all of them, predator and prey, winner and loser. Today she would make the calls, execute the trades, destroy another company and hundreds of jobs in the name of shareholder value.

But tomorrow, she decided, watching her reflection's eyes darken with something like resolve, tomorrow she would finally call her sister. Tomorrow she would book that trip to Alaska she'd been postponing for a decade. Tomorrow she would start living.

The vitamin sat on the counter, a tiny orange promise that today, at least, she chose to survive.