The Supplement

The divorce papers sat on Maya's kitchen counter for three weeks before she finally signed them. Each morning, she'd make coffee, look at the stack of white pages, and take her vitamin D supplement instead — a small, optimistic pill that promised stronger bones, better mood, something concrete she could fix.

"You're running on fumes," Sarah had said during their coffee date last week. Sarah, who'd been Maya's friend since college, who'd held her hair back when she drank too much tequila sophomore year, who'd stood as her maid of honor. Now Sarah was sleeping with Maya's soon-to-be-ex-husband.

Maya had started running after she found out — real running, not the elliptical machine she'd been lying to herself about for years. 5 AM, pavement slick with morning dew, headphones loud enough to drown out the thoughts that chased her. Her shins ached. Her lungs burned. She kept running anyway.

The vitamins multiplied on her counter. Vitamin C for immunity (she couldn't afford to get sick). B-complex for stress (she was maxed out). Magnesium for sleep (she wasn't). Each bottle a small attempt to patch the holes in herself, to engineer a version of Maya who could survive this.

"He says you never listened," Sarah had told her, phone pressed to her ear in that coffee shop, as if this were confessional girl talk, not a knife in the back. "He says you were always somewhere else."

Maya wanted to scream that she was right there. She was the one who paid the mortgage on time, who remembered his mother's birthday, who stocked the fridge with his favorite beer. But maybe she had been somewhere else — somewhere in the future, always planning, preparing, supplementing against a catastrophe that finally arrived anyway.

This morning, she laced up her running shoes at 4:45 AM. She swallowed her handful of vitamins with lukewarm tap water. She didn't look at the divorce papers. She opened the front door and stepped into the dark.

Her feet hit the pavement in rhythm. breathe. strike. breathe. strike. The vitamins couldn't fix this. Running couldn't fix this. But the sun was coming up, and she was still moving, and maybe that was enough.

The papers would still be there when she got back.