The Vitamin Deficiency

Elena stood in her apartment bathroom, swallowing another vitamin D supplement with lukewarm tap water. The doctor said her levels were critically low, but she knew better. It wasn't a deficiency—it was the artificial lighting of her office building, the pyramid-shaped glass monument where she spent twelve hours a day playing corporate spy.

She'd been hired to investigate the new VP of Operations, a man suspected of leaking proprietary data to competitors. The job should have taken two weeks. It had been six months, and Elena had fallen into the routine of watching him like she was watching herself in a funhouse mirror.

"You look like a zombie," her sister had said over dinner last night. Elena hadn't denied it. She moved through her days on autopilot, her actual work—monitoring emails, tracking access logs, compiling reports that went nowhere—blurring together like watercolors in the rain.

The VP's office window looked down on the old baseball stadium across the river. Elena found herself staring at it during her surveillance, remembering Saturday games with her father before he got sick. The crack of the bat, the smell of cheap hot dogs and sunscreen, the way he'd squeezed her shoulder when their team lost. That was the last time she'd felt something real.

Her phone buzzed. A message from the VP himself: "We need to stop meeting like this."

Elena's heart raced. He knew. Of course he knew. He'd been baiting her for months, waiting for her to figure out what he was actually doing: not leaking data, but building evidence against the company's fraudulent accounting practices. The pyramid scheme wasn't in the organizational chart—it was in the books.

She deleted her report. All of it. Then she typed back: "Meet me at the stadium."

For the first time in six months, Elena felt something like hope. She swallowed the rest of the vitamin bottle. She wouldn't be needing them anymore.