The Supplements of Regret

Elena sat at the hotel bar, nursing her sparkling water with lime, watching the condensation weep down the glass like she refused to weep herself. Forty-two years old and still waiting for men who weren't worth the wait.

She adjusted the wide-brimmed hat she'd bought in a moment of romantic foolishness—a disguise, really, for the version of herself who believed in second chances. Her hair, freshly cut into sharp angles that framed a face beginning to show the first faint etchings of time, caught the dim light. She'd chopped it all off yesterday, an impulse decision at a salon where the stylist asked if she was going through something. Elena had almost laughed. Wasn't everyone?

"You look like you're hiding," a voice said beside her.

She turned. A man, perhaps fifty, with kind eyes and the weary posture of someone who'd made peace with his own disappointments. His drink was untouched—a whiskey, neat.

"I'm waiting," she said, which was technically true. David was supposed to meet her here. David, with his carefully curated supplement regimen and his lecture about how she should start taking vitamin D for her bone health, for her mood, for their future together. David, who was now two hours late.

"The waiting's the hardest part," the stranger said. "I used to wait for my wife to come back from her business trips. She never stopped leaving."

Elena's phone remained dark on the bar. No messages. No excuses. Just the silence that said everything she'd been refusing to hear.

She slid off the hat, letting her liberated hair catch the bar's false warmth. "My partner—well, ex-partner, I suppose—always said I was like water. That I'd flow around problems instead of facing them."

"Water's powerful though," he said, signaling the bartender for another round. "It wears down mountains given enough time."

"I think I'm finally ready to be the flood," Elena said, and meant it.

She ordered a real drink. She thought about all those vitamins she'd swallowed for David, all the small accommodations that had accumulated like sediment in her veins. Not tonight. Tonight she would drown in something honest.