The Supplement

She found the bottle on his nightstand — a neon orange cylinder of vitamin D supplements. The expiration date was three months away, which meant three months of plans she didn't know about. She was still running from the truth about their marriage, even as she packed her bags in the gray light of dawn.

His dog, a weathered golden retriever named Bear, watched from the doorway. The animal had been hers originally, a wedding gift from her mother, now dead. Bear had chosen Mark somewhere in year seven, somewhere around the time the silences at dinner grew long enough to fill with things they couldn't say.

"You're really doing this?" Mark stood in the hallway, sleep-rumpled and soft in ways that used to comfort her. Now it just felt like surrender.

"You bought vitamins for a future you didn't tell me about."

"They're for my back, Sarah. The doctor said—"

"No," she cut him off. "You bought the ninety-count bottle. That's three months. You're planning something, and I'm not part of it."

He didn't deny it. That was the worst part — not the betrayal itself, but the cowardice of its quiet architecture. They'd stopped running together two years ago when her knee surgery derailed her training, but she'd always assumed they'd find their way back to each other through other routes.

Bear padded into the room and pressed his warm weight against her leg, whining softly. She knelt to bury her face in his familiar smell of corn chips and loyalty, feeling the terrible symmetry of it: the dog staying, the marriage ending, the vitamins marking time like a bomb someone forgot to detonate.

"You'll take Bear?" she asked, and something in Mark's face cracked.

"If that's what you want."

It wasn't. None of this was. But she was running out of forward motion, and staying still had become its own kind of death. She zipped her bag and didn't look back at the vitamins on the nightstand, at the ninety tiny promises she'd never keep.