The Vitamin Regimen

Elena sorted the pills on the kitchen counter: vitamin D, omega-3, magnesium, the colorful regiment of her father's declining years. Each morning she arranged them in his favorite baseball mug—the Yankees one he'd held aloft when they'd gone to the stadium together, thirty years ago. He hadn't been to a game in a decade. arthritis and time had seen to that.

She should leave for work. Her flight to Seattle departed in four hours. Another assignment, another corporation suspicious of leaks, another three weeks of sterile hotel rooms and room service. She was good at it—finding the person selling secrets, the spy in the machine. Her clients called her thorough. Her ex-husband called her obsessive.

The television hummed in the living room. Her father fell asleep to cable news every night now, a routine as fixed as his medication schedule. She checked on him, found him slumped in his recliner, a thin blanket across his legs. The news anchor spoke softly about market trends.

On his bedside table, she noticed something: a stack of envelopes, rubber-banded together. Return address: none. Postmark: Seattle.

Elena sat on the edge of his bed. The first envelope contained a photograph—her mother, younger, laughing. The second: another photograph, her mother with dark hair, wearing a red sweater Elena had never seen. The third: a letter in her mother's handwriting.

She read them all. Each one was dated, each one signed "Your Secret Admirer." None were mailed. Her father had written them over twenty years, then never sent.

"Dad," she said, her voice cracking.

He stirred, opened his eyes. "You're still here."

"Why didn't you send them?"

He looked at the envelopes in her hand. His face crumbled. "She knew. She always knew."

"What?"

"Your mother. She knew I wrote them. It was our game. She'd find them, read them, pretend she hadn't. It made her feel—seen. Wanted. Even after all those years." He coughed, a wet, rattling sound. "I stopped writing when she got sick. I couldn't pretend anymore."

Elena thought about all the secrets she'd uncovered professionally. All the people who thought they were hiding something. All the lies that had seemed so important in the moment. "You wrote them to make her feel loved."

"I wrote them because I needed her to know. Even if she already did."

She sat with him until his breathing evened out, until the television's glow painted the walls in shifting colors. Her flight would leave without her. Some assignments weren't about other people's secrets at all.