The Supplements We Keep

The prenatal vitamins sat on the counter like accusations—orange bottles with white labels, three years expired. Mara hadn't thrown them away. Neither had Ben. They'd become something else entirely: artifacts of a future that never arrived, preserved in amber like insects that died mid-flight.

Ben's hand hovered over them sometimes, palm open, fingers trembling. He'd started taking Vitamin D instead, as if substitution might somehow rewrite the genetic code of their disappointment.

"Are you watching that documentary again?" Mara asked from the couch. The television flickered with underwater scenes—bioluminescent creatures swimming through midnight waters, alien and indifferent.

"It's peaceful," Ben said. "They don't know they're in the dark."

The cable bill had become their largest monthly expense after they stopped trying to conceive. No more fertility treatments, no more invasive procedures, no more optimism taxed at three hundred percent. Now they just existed together in the same apartment, two celestial bodies caught in each other's gravity but slowly drifting apart.

Mara remembered their trip to Mexico, back when they still believed wanting something was the same as earning it. They'd stayed in a cabana with a palm roof that let in starlight. They'd swum in the ocean at night, naked and salt-crusted, making promises about children they would name Sofia or James or maybe something they hadn't thought of yet.

That palm tree had fallen in a hurricane two years later. She'd seen it on Google Street View, a scar in the sand where something once stood.

"Ben."

"Hmm?"

"I'm going to throw away the vitamins."

He turned from the television. Something in his face shifted—relief, maybe, or just the exhaustion of holding onto things that had already let go of him.

"Okay," he said. "Okay."

She carried the bottles to the trash. They made a soft sound when they landed—lighter than she expected. The weight had been all theirs to carry.