The Supplements

The bottles lined their bathroom counter like a constellation of failed promises. Vitamin D, B-complex, magnesium, omega-3. Elena had started taking them six months ago, when she first began sleeping in the guest room. Each evening, she swallowed them with a glass of water, staring at her reflection in the mirror as if willing something to change.

Marcus watched her from the doorway. Her hair—once the rich copper color that had made him turn his head in that crowded bar fifteen years ago—was dull now, pulled back in a loose bun she never took down anymore. He remembered how it used to spill across his pillow, how he'd bury his face in it and inhale the scent of her coconut shampoo.

"You're staring," she said, not turning around.

"I'm not."

"You are. It's annoying."

The worst part wasn't the silence or the separate rooms or the sex they hadn't had in eight months. It was that they'd become something else entirely—a married couple who moved through the same spaces like zombies, automatic and hollow, rehearsing routines that had lost all meaning. She'd stopped trying to reach him. He'd stopped trying to figure out why.

"I ran into Sarah today," he said, trying to find something—anything—that still connected them. "She asked how we were."

Elena finally turned. Her eyes were flat. "What did you say?"

"I said we were fine."

"Fine." She laughed, short and sharp. "That's the word, isn't it? We're fine. We're a fine couple in a fine house with our fine, vitamin-supplemented life."

"Elena—"

"Do you even remember the last time you asked me how I actually was? Not 'how was your day' automatic. But really asked. Like a friend would. Like someone who gives a damn."

The question hung between them. He couldn't remember.

"I found the receipt," she said. "From the hotel downtown. Three weeks ago."

His stomach dropped. "It wasn't—"

"Save it. I don't care who she was. That's not the point." She opened the medicine cabinet and began sweeping the vitamin bottles into the trash. "The point is that you'd rather do this—this endless, quiet dying—than just be honest with me."

"I didn't know how to tell you I fell out of love with us," he said, and the truth of it hit him like physical pain.

Elena's shoulders slumped. The fight left her all at once. She looked at him—really looked at him—for what might have been the first time in years.

"Well," she said quietly. "At least that's something."

She took down her hair, shook it loose, and walked past him into their bedroom. The guest room door remained closed.