The Vitamin Deficiency

Maya watches Carlos serve across the padel court, his racket cutting through the humid afternoon air. The orange ball arcs toward her, and she swings too late. Again.

"You're distracted," he calls from the baseline, not unkindly. Just stating facts, like he always does.

She doesn't tell him she's been counting the days since she stopped taking her vitamins. Seventeen days since she decided to stop pretending that supplements could fix what was actually broken between them.

Back at their apartment, Carlos peels an orange at the kitchen counter. The citrus scent fills the silence between them. He used to bring her oranges after every padel match, during that first year when everything felt possible. Now the gesture feels mechanical, like he's reading from a script he forgot he memorized.

"My mother asked about the vitamins," he says, casual, like it means nothing. "She noticed you looked tired at dinner."

Maya feels something snap inside her. "I'm fine."

"You haven't been taking them."

She stares at him. "You track my vitamins?"

"I track everything. That's why I'm better at padel. That's why I'm better at—" He stops himself.

At us, she finishes silently. At us.

The phone rings. His work. He answers, turning away, and Maya watches his back, the same back she's woken up beside for twelve years. She realizes she's been living on supplements of their marriage—the orange after matches, the scheduled date nights, the vitamins he notices when she stops taking them.

She picks up the orange half he's left on the counter. The flesh is暴露 to air, already beginning to oxidize, to brown. Like anything left too long in the light.

When Carlos hangs up, she's still standing there, holding the orange like evidence.

"I don't want to play padel this weekend," she says.

He blinks. The confusion on his face is genuine, and that's almost worse than indifference.

"But the tournament—"

"I know. I don't want to play."

She takes a bite of the orange. It's tart, sweeter than she expected. For the first time in months, something tastes real.

"Okay," he says slowly.

Maya swallows. "Just okay?"

"What do you want me to say?"

She doesn't know. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe that's always been the problem.

The orange sits in her hand like a small,沉重的 sun. Somewhere in their bedroom, the vitamin bottle waits on her nightstand. Both options feel like surrender.

She finishes the orange in the silence, juice dripping down her wrist, sticky and real and impossible to fake.