The Supplement

The lightning struck just as Elena unlocked the office door, illuminating the rain-slicked street in a violent flash. She'd been running this startup for three years, and tonight might be its last. The investor meeting was tomorrow—nine A.M.—and the bull she'd been feeding them about "projected growth" was finally catching up with her.

Her phone buzzed. Mark. Of course. She'd been sleeping with him for six months, a messy entanglement that blurred every professional line she'd sworn never to cross. His hair always smelled like sandalwood and bad decisions.

"Are you still at the office?" he asked, skipping hello.

"Just leaving."

"We need to talk about the deck. The numbers don't work, Elena."

She stared at her reflection in the darkened window—hollow eyes, hair frizzing from the humidity, thirty-four years old and pretending she knew what she was doing. The vitamin supplements on her desk stood in neat rows, organized by color. She'd been taking them religiously, as if health could be systemized like a quarterly report.

"I'll fix it," she said, and hung up.

She didn't fix it. Instead, she called her mother in Chicago, waking her.

"Your father's prostate is back," her mother said, as if discussing the weather. "The doctor says it's the vitamins. He takes too many."

Elena looked at her own supplements. "Is he okay?"

"He's eighty-two. Nobody's okay at eighty-two. He keeps asking about the bull."

"The bull?"

"The one that gored him when you were twelve. He says it visits him in dreams now."

Elena remembered the farm, the way the animal had tossed her father into the air like he was nothing. The memory had been preserved in amber, crystalline and terrifying.

She walked to the window. The storm had passed. Her phone lit up again—Mark, probably calling to strategize, to posture, to pretend they could engineer their way out of this.

She didn't answer. She swept the vitamins into the trash, all that organized effort toward a future that might not exist anyway. Some things couldn't be solved. Some things just had to be endured.

Her father was right. The bull always returned.