The Vitamin Deficiency

Elena's running shoes hit the pavement at 5:47 AM, exactly as they had every morning for three years. Her breath formed small clouds in the pre-dawn chill, each exhale a tiny surrender. She'd started running after Mark left—not to escape, she told herself, but to become. Become what, she couldn't say. Thinner, harder, faster. Someone who couldn't be left.

"You're still doing that?" Sarah had asked yesterday, as Elena choked down her morning vitamin cocktail—D3, magnesium, omega-3, a handful of colored pills that promised to fix what was broken inside. "You know they found a lump in my breast last week."

Elena had frozen, the glass halfway to her lips. "What? Why didn't you—"

"You've been busy." Sarah's voice was flat. "Running."

They hadn't spoken since.

Now, on the padel court at 7 AM, Sarah's husband waited with his racquet. David. Always David, inviting her to games, bringing her spinach salad after matches, smiling too long across the dinner table while Elena discussed her new training regimen, her new diet, her new life without the woman who had been her friend since college.

"You ready?" David called, bouncing the ball.

The game began, and something in Elena snapped. She stopped running after every shot, stopped caring about form or technique. She played aggressively, violently, sending balls sailing past him, slamming into the glass walls. David stopped smiling.

"What is this?" he asked between points.

"This is me not running," she said, and hit the ball directly at his chest.

They walked afterward, the way they always did, but the silence was different. "Sarah told me," David said. "About the cancer. Stage two. She didn't want you to know because she knew you'd make it about you. About your vitamins, your exercise, your obsession with control."

Elena stopped. "I was trying to be healthy."

"You were trying to be perfect," he said. "But Elena—nobody gets out of this alive. Not even the ones who take the vitamins."

The next morning, Elena laced her running shoes but didn't go out. Instead, she drove to the hospital, found Sarah's room, and sat in the chair beside the bed. "I brought you something," she said, and placed a container of spinach salad on the tray. "And I stopped taking the vitamins."

Sarah smiled, tired and real. "Progress."

Outside, dawn broke over the parking lot. For the first time in three years, Elena didn't feel like running.