The Pharmacy Mirror

Margaret stood in the supplement aisle, fluorescent lights humming overhead, comparing vitamin bottles with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb. At forty-seven, she'd started measuring her life in milligrams andRecommended Daily Values.

Three months ago, David had left. Not dramatically—no thrown dishes or screaming matches. Just a quiet conversation over dinner about how he'd "grown" and "needed space" and wasn't sure he wanted children anymore. Margaret had nodded, swallowed her wine, and asked if he wanted the rest of the spinach. She'd been preparing that damn spinach for years because his mother said it was good for his heart.

Now she stood in this pharmacy, holding a bottle of prenatal vitamins she'd never use, wondering why she kept buying them. Hope, she supposed. Or habit.

Her phone buzzed. David's name lit up the screen.

"Did you want your dad's old hat?" she typed back, then deleted it. Too petty.

Instead: "Sure, I can leave it at the front desk."

The hat—a beat-up fedora he'd worn to every job interview, every first date (including theirs), every funeral—sat in her closet. She'd hated it. He'd looked like a pretentious professor, like he was performing "sophisticated adult" without earning it.

But she missed how he'd looked in it. How he'd do a little bow when she came home late from work, how the brim would hide his eyes when he was pretending not to cry at sad movies.

Margaret put the vitamins back on the shelf. She grabbed a bottle of Vitamin D instead—her doctor had said she was deficient. Probably from all those years working in windowless offices, chasing promotions she'd stopped caring about somewhere around year twelve.

The truth was, she didn't want the hat back. She didn't want the spinach recipes she'd perfected. She didn't want these vitamins that marked time she couldn't get back.

She wanted to want them. That was the problem.

Margaret paid for her Vitamin D, walked past the spinach in the produce aisle, and decided to order pizza for dinner. For the first time in fifteen years, she didn't check her phone to see if it was healthy enough.