The Vitamin Regimen

The pool was empty at 7 AM, just how Elena liked it. She sat on the edge, feet dangling in the chlorinated water, and swallowed her daily vitamin with a gulp from a plastic bottle. The orange pill had become a ritual—something she could control when everything else felt like it was slipping away.

Her husband Mark's baseball cap sat on the chair beside her, turned backward exactly how he used to wear it to their son's weekend games. He'd been gone three months now, not dead—just gone. Left in the middle of the night with nothing but a backpack and his laptop. The lawyer said it happened all the time. Men of a certain age, hitting their fifties, suddenly convinced they'd missed their real lives.

The mortgage was due Tuesday. Elena had started selling her jewelry on eBay.

A rustle in the bushes made her jump. A fox—sleek and red as a fresh wound—emerged at the property line, watching her with intelligent eyes. It was the third time she'd seen it since Mark left. Same spot, same unblinking stare. She wondered if animals could sense abandonment, if they gathered like vultures around marriages that had already begun to rot from the inside.

"He's not coming back," she told the fox aloud. The words felt like stones in her throat.

The fox tilted its head, then turned and vanished into the undergrowth.

Elena slid into the pool. The water was shockingly cold against her skin. She let herself sink to the bottom, holding her breath until her lungs burned. Down here, everything was muffled and blue and peaceful. No mortgage. No lawyer's voice on the phone. No baseball cap that smelled faintly of his hair and cigarettes.

She broke the surface gasping.

On the chair, Mark's hat remained exactly where she'd left it.

Elena climbed out of the pool, dripping and shivering, and picked up the cap. She turned it forward this time, then dropped it into the trash can beside the gate.

Tomorrow, she thought, she'd skip the vitamin. Some things you just couldn't supplement away.