The Vitamin Paradox

Miranda's hair began falling out three weeks after Arthur left. Not dramatically—just enough that her hairbrush gathered small dark clusters each morning, like dead moths. She'd find them on her pillow, on her sweater, in the drain of the shower she'd once shared with a man who'd collected vintage watches and loyalty tokens from other women.

At forty-seven, with a corporate restructuring looming like a storm front, she found herself standing in the supplement aisle of CVS at midnight, staring at a bottle of biotin. Vitamin deficiency, the internet had suggested. The simplest explanation. Her body was simply running on insufficient fuel.

She bought the vitamins anyway.

The next morning, her neighbor's bull terrier, Buster, escaped again. The dog was ancient, half-blind, and had a peculiar habit of sitting on Miranda's porch and staring at her front door as though expecting someone. Miranda found herself sharing her coffee with him, breaking the no-pets rule of her building because something about Buster's stubborn, graying face felt familiar.

"You're waiting for someone too," she whispered, scratching behind his ears. Buster leaned into her touch, his tail thumping a slow, deliberate rhythm against the floorboards.

That afternoon, the quarterly reviews happened. Her supervisor, a twenty-six-year-old with teeth too white for a human face, used the word "synergy" fourteen times and gestured with manicured hands while explaining that Miranda's position was being "bullished"—corporate speak for phased out through attrition. She'd have three months.

Three months to decide who she was without the job that had consumed her twenties and thirties. Three months to figure out why Arthur's betrayal still felt sharper than her own displacement.

She walked home with the bottle of vitamins in her purse. Buster waited on her porch, patient as ever. Inside, she swallowed two capsules with a glass of wine and stared at her reflection. Dark circles under eyes that still looked like hers. Hair that was thinning but still there.

The vitamins wouldn't fix anything. She knew that. But she took them anyway—ritual as prayer, discipline as hope. Buster whined softly, pressing his warm weight against her leg. Some waits ended with doors opening. Others just strengthened the muscles required to stand there longer.

She scratched his ears and took another vitamin.