The Supplement of Memory

Margaret found him at the funeral reception, standing alone near the buffet where a bowl of goldfish crackers sat largely untouched. David. Her oldest friend. The friend who had stopped speaking to her three years ago after she'd slept with his husband.

She'd been running every morning since it happened—five miles, rain or shine—as if she could outpace the shame that lived in her chest like a cold stone. But shame has excellent endurance. It keeps pace.

"You look healthy," he said, not meeting her eyes. His voice was flat. "Taking your vitamins?"

The joke landed like a slap. Back when they were inseparable, Margaret had been obsessed with supplements. Vitamin D for mood, B12 for energy, magnesium for sleep. She'd swallowed them with religious devotion, as if each pill could fill the hollow spaces inside her.

"I stopped," she said. "Turns out you can't supplement away character defects."

David's lip twitched. Almost a smile. "Worth a try."

They stood together in silence while the room hummed with muted conversations and the clink of glasses. His mother's casket was somewhere nearby, waiting to be lowered into the earth. It felt wrong that they should both be here, alive and breathing, when someone else had stopped.

"I'm sorry about your mother," she said quietly. "She was kind to me. Even after."

"She asked about you last week," David said. "In the hospice. She said, 'Whatever happened to that nice girl who was always taking her vitamins?'"

Margaret felt something crack open in her chest. "What did you tell her?"

"I told her you were running." He looked at her then, really looked at her. "That you'd been running for a long time."

"I have."

"Margaret." His voice softened. "You can't run forever. Eventually you have to stop. Eventually you have to feel it."

"I know," she said. "But I'm not done running yet."

He nodded, like he understood. Like maybe he'd been running too, in his own way, from his own ghost.

"The fish," he said, gesturing toward the goldfish crackers. "Remember?"

She remembered. College parties, cheap wine, goldfish crackers spilled across the floor of their first apartment. Before the betrayals, before the silences, before everything that couldn't be unsaid. Back when they'd believed friendship was invincible, that some things lasted longer than three seconds.

"I remember," she said.

"Me too," said David. "Me too."