The Supplement

The morning ritual began, as it had for seven years, with a vitamin B-12 supplement — the same yellow pill that Elena's doctor promised would cure her creeping fatigue. Nothing did. She swallowed it dry while reading yet another corporate email about synergy and forward momentum.

"You look like hell," Marcus said, leaning against her cubicle wall. Her oldest friend at the firm, and the only one who didn't pretend the impending merger wasn't a thinly veiled purge. He'd aged in dog years since their first entry-level positions together. Gray at the temples, lines around eyes that had seen too many quarterly reports.

"Thanks, Marc. You really know how to make a girl feel alive."

"I'm serious. That project with Richardson is eating you. I hear him in his office, shouting about deliverables until eight most nights. That's not leadership, that's compensation."

Elena rubbed her temples. Richardson did shout. And somewhere beneath the exhaustion, she'd started calculating something else — the exact number in her 401(k), the severance package she'd negotiated three jobs ago, the terrifying arithmetic of walking away.

"The membership lapse notice came," she said instead. "The gym. For the swimming pool."

"So renew it."

"I haven't been in fourteen months, Marc. What am I paying for? The fantasy that I might one day again experience the sensation of weightlessness? That I might stop treading water long enough to actually feel something?"

Marcus laughed, but it was gentle. "We're all treading water, El. Some of us just kick harder."

That evening, Richardson cornered her by the elevators. "Another vitamin deficiency, I suppose? You don't have the stamina for this work anymore. Maybe it's time to consider options."

She watched his mouth move, the calculated cruelty disguised as mentorship. In the fluorescent reflection of his glasses, she saw herself — tired, perhaps, but intact. Whole.

The next morning, she didn't take the vitamin. She called the pool. She renewed the membership. And somewhere in the water, suspended in blue silence, she finally understood what it meant to stop drowning without even realizing you'd been under.