The Supplementation

Elena had been running from the mirror for three years. At forty-two, the fine lines around her eyes had stopped being charming and started looking like evidence. Evidence of time, of gravity, of the slow erosion that no one talked about at dinner parties.

She stood in her bathroom at 11:47 PM, the fluorescent light flickering like a warning, staring at the amber bottle on the counter. The vitamin D supplement — her doctor's recommendation for bone health, for mood regulation, for everything that felt increasingly unmanageable. She'd been taking them religiously, a daily ritual of control in a life spinning off its axis.

"They're expensive piss," her brother had said last Thanksgiving, drunk and cruel in that way family sometimes is. "But if it makes you feel better, Leni, go for it."

It had made her feel better. Until tonight, when she'd read the study. The meta-analysis showing no significant difference in mortality between those who supplemented and those who didn't. The placebo had been working, and now she knew.

She tipped the bottle over the sink. The capsules clicked against the porcelain, a scatter of tiny promises she'd been making to herself. I will not age. I will not be afraid. I will not become my mother, who died at forty-nine from something genetic and unavoidable, regardless of her vitamin cabinet.

Then the phone rang. Her brother's wife. "Elena, I'm so sorry. He had a heart attack. It was... it was lightning fast, they said."

She stood there, the spilled vitamins reflecting the bathroom light like fallen stars, and understood something devastating: her brother, with all his cynicism about supplementation and healthy living and planning ahead, had been the one to go first. Not slowly, not with time for preparation or rituals, but sudden and absolute.

Elena swept the vitamins back into the bottle. She would take one tomorrow, and the next day, not because they would save her — they wouldn't, nothing would — but because the act of trying mattered more than the result. Some running away wasn't cowardice. Sometimes it was just how you caught your breath.