The Mourning After

The vitamin D supplement sat on her nightstand, a small amber capsule that Elena hadn't taken since Marcus died. Three months of grief, and she was still moving through her days like some half-alive creature, a zombie in designer athleisure wear, going through motions that no longer meant anything.

"You need to get out of the house," Sarah had said, pressing the padel racket into her hands. "Trust me."

So here she was, at 7 AM on a Saturday, standing on a blue court that smelled vaguely of rubber and desperation. Her opponent was David—recently divorced, selling his house, carrying his own particular brand of walking-dead energy. They'd been paired together for three weeks now, two broken things colliding in mid-air.

The game began. Elena's body remembered what her mind had forgotten—the satisfying thwack of ball against racket, the rhythm of movement, the strange clarity that came when you had to anticipate where something small and fast would land next. For forty-five minutes, she wasn't the widow. She wasn't the woman who'd stopped taking her vitamins and started drinking wine at 3 PM. She was just muscle and bone and motion, reacting.

Afterward, they sat on a bench outside the clubhouse, breathing hard in the October chill. David handed her a water bottle. Their fingers brushed.

"My wife used to make me take these," David said, pulling a bottle of supplements from his bag. "Omega-3s. Said they were good for my heart."

Elena looked at him—really looked at him—for the first time. The lines around his eyes. The way his hair curled at the nape of his neck when damp with sweat. The particular quality of his aloneness, which matched her own.

"Marcus was the same," she said. "Vitamin D. Said I was always deficient."

They sat in silence for a moment, two zombies discovering they weren't actually dead anymore.

"Same time next week?" David asked.

Elena nodded. "Same time."

That night, she took the vitamin D capsule. And for the first time in months, she fell asleep without imagining the empty space beside her as a grave. Just space. Waiting to be filled.