The Vitamin of Letting Go

Elena adjusted the brim of her husband's fedora, the one he'd left on the closet floor three years ago when he walked out. She still kept it there, a silent accusation in wool and satin.

She sat on the edge of the hotel bed in Room 417, clutching her iPhone like a lifeline. The screen lit up with another message from him: *Can we talk?* Elena had spent six months pretending these texts didn't arrive, marking each as read without responding, maintaining her dignified silence.

Her fingers hovered over the reply button. She'd rehearsed this moment countless times in the shower, in traffic, in the hollow hours after midnight. But now, confronted by the glowing possibility of reconnection, she felt nothing but exhaustion.

On the nightstand sat a bottle of prenatal vitamins—relics from a pregnancy she'd lost last spring, a lonely, quiet miscarriage that had happened while she was alone in their apartment, Daniel already three months gone. She'd told herself she kept them because they were expensive, because maybe someday, because hope was a stubborn, illogical thing.

The hat on her head smelled faintly of his cologne—sandalwood and expensive whiskey. It was ridiculous, wearing his hat like this, trying to inhabit the version of herself that had existed before everything fell apart. Before she'd learned how easily a decade of marriage could unravel.

Her phone buzzed again. *Please, El.*

Elena stood up, the hat slipping slightly. She walked to the mirror and saw a stranger staring back—thinner around the cheeks, eyes that had witnessed too much loneliness, hands that trembled just enough to notice if you looked closely.

She picked up the vitamin bottle and twisted the cap open. The pills rattled like false hope. She dumped them into the trash can, one by one, watching them fall like tiny white stars into darkness.

Then she typed three words and hit send before she could change her mind: *No. We can't.*

She took off the hat, folded it gently, and placed it in the drawer with his things. Tomorrow she would box it all. Tonight, she would sleep in Room 417 alone, and for the first time in three years, she wouldn't be waiting for someone who wasn't coming back.