The Vitamin Deal

The vitamin D sat on the corner of her desk like a tiny yellow judgment. Sarah stared at it, then at the glow of her monitor reflecting the Chicago skyline at 2 AM. Her office had become a pyramid of empty promises—late nights, takeout containers, and the gradual erosion of everything she once thought mattered.

"You're still here?" Ethan's voice carried from the doorway. He held two water bottles, condensation dripping like afterthoughts.

Sarah didn't turn. "Some of us are trying to make partner before we're forty."

"And some of us are trying to remember what forty feels like." He set a bottle on her desk. "I saw your ex downstairs."

The air in the room thickened. "Michael?"

"With his new fiancée. She looks like she's never seen a spreadsheet." Ethan leaned against her doorframe, arms crossed. "He asked about you."

"I bet he did." Sarah finally looked at him. Ethan, who'd been her work wife for six years, who knew her coffee order and her deepest fears and exactly why she'd never walked away from this career that was slowly hollowing her out.

"You could have left with them, you know," Ethan said softly. "After the merger. Start fresh."

"And do what?" Sarah laughed, brittle as old glass. "I'm a corporate lawyer, Ethan. That's not something you just wash off in the sink."

"No." He pushed off the doorframe. "But it's something you can choose to stop being."

She watched him walk away, and something in her chest—something she hadn't felt in years—actually cracked open. Sarah stood up, grabbed her coat, and followed him into the hallway where the cleaning crews worked like ghosts around them.

"Ethan."

He turned.

"I keep thinking about that weekend in Montana," she said. "When we almost"

"Didn't almost." His voice dropped. "Did. And then we pretended we didn't."

"I was married."

"You're not now." He stepped closer. "And neither am I."

The fluorescent lights hummed between them like electricity. Sarah remembered that morning by the lake, watching a bear and her cubs while the sun came up, Ethan's hand warm in hers, the certainty that she had chosen wrong settling into her bones like cold.

"I don't want to die at this desk," she whispered.

Ethan reached out, fingertips grazing her wrist. "Then don't."

Sarah took the vitamin, swallowed it dry, and for the first time in a decade, let herself hope.