The Vitamin Deficiency

Sarah woke to her iPhone buzzing at 4:47 AM — the seventh night this week. Marcus's contact name glowed mockingly: 'Do Not Answer.' She silenced it, then lay watching the ceiling fan's slow rotation, running through the conversation they'd had yesterday in the parking garage.

'I'm done, Sarah. You can't just vitamin your way out of depression. You can't supplement-pill a marriage back to life.' He'd said it with that devastating gentleness that hurt more than shouting.

She rolled over, grabbed her phone, opened the health app. Step count: 2,341. Vitamin D: insufficient. Sleep: poor. Her entire existence quantified into red notification badges.

At 6 AM she was lacing up running shoes, pounding pavement through pre-dawn Seattle fog. This was her new ritual — the thing that was supposed to fix everything. The endorphins, the fresh air, the goddamn vitamins she swallowed with increasing desperation.

Her phone chimed. Marcus again. 'I left my fox on the bedside table. The ceramic one. From Vermont.' Their first anniversary. She remembered the art fair, the way he'd studied each booth, finally settling on this small handcrafted fox with one ear slightly crooked. 'It looks wise,' he'd said. 'Like it knows things.'

She should reply. Should engage in the agonizing dance of their unraveling. Instead she deleted the message and kept running, her breath fogging in the cold air, legs pumping toward nothing in particular.

By Thursday, her boss called her into his office. 'You're running on fumes, Sarah. The quarterly projections are bull and you know it. What's going on?'

She told him about the divorce. About running at 6 AM to feel something. About the vitamins. About waking up to an empty apartment where the fox seemed to watch her with its crooked ear and knowing eyes.

He blinked. 'My ex used to say vitamins couldn't fix a broken heart either. Turns out, she was right. But they didn't hurt either.'

That night, Sarah didn't run. She sat on her balcony with the ceramic fox, vitamin bottle beside her, phone silent. She drank wine and watched the city lights, and for the first time in weeks, she didn't try to fix anything. She just let herself be broken.

The fox seemed to approve.