The Unspoken Rupture

Emma counted the vitamin supplements with surgical precision: D for the bones she refused to let weaken, B-complex for the energy her marriage had been slowly leaching away. The cat, Luna, watched from the kitchen counter with those indifferent yellow eyes that seemed to ask why she bothered.

"Running late again," Mark called from the hallway, the thud of his padel racket against the floorboards like a metronome counting down their remaining time together. He was always running now—to the court, to the gym, to anywhere their house wasn't suffocatingly quiet.

Emma swallowed the pills dry. At forty-three, she'd learned that some things required no accompaniment.

"Your father called," she said, not turning from the window. "He wants us for Sunday dinner."

"Can't. Tournament."

The screen door slapped shut behind him. Luna jumped down and rubbed against her ankle, a rare warmth in the cold silence of their kitchen. Emma had started feeding the cat vitamin supplements too, a quiet rebellion against Mark's joke that she was just "running a pharmacy now."

That night, she dreamt she was running through a padel court that stretched into infinity, Mark's back receding toward a horizon she'd never reach. She woke to Luna purring against her chest, the vitamin bottle tipped over on the nightstand like an accusation.

"We need to talk," she told him over coffee the next morning.

Mark set down his cup. The cat watched from between them, a small gray referee.

"I know," he said.

She wasn't surprised he'd been running toward something instead of away. That was the thing about vitamins—you could take them every day and still not know what was missing until someone pointed out the hole in your life.

"Pass the B-complex," she said, and something in the air shifted, like the moment before a serve, when anything was still possible.