The Vitamin Friend

The padel court echoed with the rhythmic thwack of ball against racket, a sound that had become the soundtrack to our Thursday afternoon ritual for three years. Mark's serve sliced through the humid air, and I tracked the orange ball against the glass walls, my breath coming shorter these days, my knees protesting more than they used to.

"You're moving slower," he called out, not unkindly. "Maybe up the B12?"

I grimaced, wiping sweat from my eyes. Since my health scare last winter, Mark had appointed himself my personal wellness consultant. His iPhone contained more data about my vitamin regimen, sleep patterns, and step counts than my own medical records. He'd created spreadsheets. He'd sent me articles about oxidative stress and adaptogenic mushrooms at 2 AM. He cared, in the way only someone who'd found you curled on a bathroom floor throwing up blood could care.

Or so I'd thought.

After the match, we sat on the bench, his phone face-down between us. He'd gone to grab us waters—coconut for me, because he'd read somewhere it helped with electrolyte balance. The screen lit up with a notification: *New message: EVIDENCE_GROUP_CHAT*.

I shouldn't have looked. But the notification preview showed something that made my chest hollow out: a photo of me, taken last Thursday, mid-match, face twisted in exhaustion. Caption: *He's not getting better. Should we stage the intervention soon?*

The evidence wasn't about my recovery. It was about his performance.

The group chat wasn't between him and our other friends, rallying support. It was between him and my wife, my brother, my therapist—everyone, planning what to do when I finally declined beyond their management. They'd been comparing notes for months. Mark wasn't my friend; he was a volunteer in the hospice of my life, measuring the decline, documenting the end.

He returned with the waters, an orange wedge glistening on the rim of my glass. "Cheers," he said, clinking them together, his eyes full of that practiced concern that suddenly looked like something else entirely. Something like anticipation.

I drank. The coconut water was warm. The orange was bitter. And somewhere, on a server I couldn't access, my decline was being catalogued, one notification at a time.