The Supplement of Regrets

Margot stared at the orange plastic bottle. Another vitamin supplement, another promise of longevity she wasn't sure she wanted anymore. At forty-seven, she'd accumulated more bottles than dreams.

"You're not listening," Marcus said, his voice sharp across the mahogany table. "This bull market isn't going to last forever. We need to diversify now."

She was listening. She just didn't care. Not about the market, not about the portfolio, not about the carefully curated life they'd built like a stage set for a play that had lost its audience.

"I bought papayas," she said instead.

Marcus paused. "What?"

"At the farmers market. They were imported. Cost twelve dollars each."

He sighed—that heavy, put-upon exhale she'd come to dread. "We talked about this. No more impulse purchases. We're saving for the second home."

The second home. The phrase hung between them like something neither knew how to wrap.

"Remember Costa Rica?" she asked softly. "When we were twenty-three and broke, eating papaya every morning from that roadside stand? You said it tasted like sunshine."

"That was twenty-five years ago, Margot. We're building something real now."

Something real. The numbers in their accounts. The property they owned. The supplements in her bathroom drawer, each one a small acknowledgment that her body would eventually fail, that all this accumulation was temporary.

Later, alone in the kitchen, she cut into the papaya. Its flesh was the color of a bruise, soft and yielding under her knife. She ate it standing over the sink, juice running down her chin, thinking about how bullshit it all was—this careful life, this deferred happiness, this slow extinction of desire in the name of something that might never arrive.

The vitamins waited on the counter. She swallowed one anyway.

Some habits were harder to break than others.