The Last Wire

Mara stared at the vitamin bottle on her nightstand—biotin for hair that kept falling out, vitamin D for the apartment that saw no sun. Thirty-two years old and already cataloging the ways her body was beginning its slow, quiet surrender.

"Your hair looks fine," Ethan had said last night, the same night he'd told her he was moving to Chicago for a promotion. "You're being dramatic."

She ran her fingers through it now, feeling the thinning that only she seemed to notice. The distance between them had grown like a slow-moving glacier, and she'd been too busy bearing it—bearing his indifference, bearing the weight of unspoken things—to notice how much ground they'd lost.

The ethernet cable lay coiled on her desk like a black snake, her literal lifeline to a world that felt increasingly remote. She worked remotely now, another compromise Ethan had reluctantly agreed to, another thread pulling loose from the fabric of their shared life.

Her phone buzzed. *Thinking of you. Can we talk?*

Mara looked at the message, then at the cable, then at her reflection in the darkened window—hair pulled back, face stripped bare, a woman she barely recognized anymore.

She'd spent years bearing small disappointments until they accumulated like silt in a riverbed. The vitamin bottle represented something she'd only just begun to understand: you couldn't supplement what was fundamentally missing. You couldn't biotin your way back to love.

The cable connected to nothing now—Ethan had taken the router in the breakup that wasn't technically a breakup yet.

Mara typed: *I don't think we should.*

Then she uncapped the vitamin bottle and swallowed one dry, watching it disappear into the dark passage of her throat, imagining it as the first small thing in a long time she was doing just for herself.