The Vitamin of Ghosts

The padel court echoed with each racket strike—thwack, thwack, thwack—a rhythm that had become the soundtrack of Marcus's middle age. At forty-seven, he'd discovered the sport through a colleague who'd called it 'tennis for people whose knees have already betrayed them.' Marcus had laughed, then spent three hundred euros on a racket he didn't need.

The real betrayal wasn't his knees. It was Clara.

'You're different,' she'd said three months ago, over dinner that neither of them had cooked. 'Like you're... I don't know. Diminished.'

He'd started taking hair vitamins then. Biotin supplements from a sleek white bottle that promised thicker growth, promised reversal. He'd stand before the bathroom mirror each morning, examining his temples, searching for evidence of renewal. What he found instead was his father's face staring back—a pyramid of aging, each level more inevitable than the last.

The calls started during his padel games. His phone would buzz against the bench, Clara's name lighting up the screen while he chased balls into the corners, sweating through shirts he washed separately now.

'I'm at the office,' she'd say when he called back. 'Late meeting.'

Marcus's office was the same office. He knew the meeting schedule. He knew which meetings were real.

The vitamins sat on his bedside table, a white ceramic pyramid of deception. He'd watched her swipe them into her purse once—his vitamins, for his hair, that she'd started taking too. When he'd mentioned it, she'd laughed. 'Just trying to keep up with you, Marc.'

His hair had started falling out in clumps last week. Stress, the doctor said. Or maybe something else. Marcus had nodded, purchased another bottle of vitamins, booked another padel court. The pyramid scheme of his marriage: he kept investing, hoping for returns that would never come.

Today, as he volleyed against the backboard, his phone lit up again. Not Clara. A different name this time. Someone from her office, someone he'd met at last year's holiday party. The message was short, the kind that doesn't require context once you understand its shape.

Marcus missed the ball. It bounced twice, then rolled away toward the fence, a small white sphere escaping the pyramid of the court. He didn't chase it. Instead he opened his palm, examined the hair caught between his fingers—thinner than yesterday, thinner still than the day before. The vitamins had never worked. He'd known. He'd kept buying anyway.

Some investments are made not because you believe in the returns, but because you cannot admit you've already lost everything you put in.