The Last Vitamin

Elena placed the small white pill in his palm, closing his fingers around it like a secret. "Your vitamin," she said, though they both knew it was a placebo now.

Marcus nodded, swallowed it dry. They stood on the balcony of their beach house, the same palm tree that had watched them for twenty years swaying in the wind like a dying metronome.

"I'm going for a run," he announced.

"You haven't run in three years, Marcus. Your knees—"

"I can still bear weight, Elena. I'm not invalid yet." The word hung between them like smoke. He wasn't invalid, but he wasn't whole either. The early onset wasn't fair, wasn't linear, wasn't anything they'd been warned about.

She watched him shuffle down the sand, his running form barely recognizable—the athletic arch of his spine collapsed forward, his arms stiff at his sides. He looked like a man carrying water uphill, a Sisyphus in nylon shorts.

Inside, she found his vitamin bottle on the counter. The label promised ENERGY, VITALITY, LIFE. She opened it and shook the capsules into her hand—eighty-nine left. She'd been giving him the last one daily, rationing hope like calories during famine.

The doctor had said the vitamins wouldn't matter anymore. His body wasn't his own. But she couldn't stop. Couldn't bear the finality of it.

She walked to the edge of the water and waited. The ocean stretched toward the horizon like an open hand, palm up, receiving everything, giving nothing back. The rhythm of waves matched the thrumming in her chest.

When Marcus returned, twenty minutes later, sweat slicked his forehead. He looked exhausted, defeated. But something had shifted in his eyes—recognition, maybe. Or resignation.

"I ran," he said simply.

"I saw," she replied.

"Tomorrow, will there still be vitamins?"

Elena looked at him, really looked, at the man who'd carried her through miscarriages and promotions and deaths of parents, who'd borne her darkest days without complaint. The water lapped at their feet, indifferent and eternal.

"Yes," she lied. "There will always be vitamins."

And he believed her, because that was what love was—believing the lie you needed to survive another sunset, another sunrise, another day of running from the thing you couldn't bear to face.