The Vitamin Store Debriefing

The baseball game played on the television—a rerun of some meaningless afternoon match from 2019. Elena watched the outfielder shag a fly ball, the same way she'd watched Marcus for fifteen years: from a distance, never quite certain what she was seeing.

Marcus poured himself water in the kitchen. Their dog, Barnaby, an aging golden retriever with cloudy eyes, rested his chin on her foot. The cat, Persephone, watched from the bookshelf, green eyes unblinking. If animals sensed betrayal, neither showed it.

"Your vitamin regimen," Marcus said, not turning around. "The B-complex. The magnesium. The D3 you started taking six months ago."

Elena's chest tightened. "What about them?"

"I swapped the bottles. Placebos."

She turned to face him. He held a glass of water, his expression unreadable. This was the man who'd held her through her mother's funeral, who knew she preferred two sugars in her coffee, who now admitted to six months of medical sabotage.

"Why?"

"Corporate espionage." His voice was flat. "Your firm. The pharmaceutical merger. I needed the inside track, and you were... loose with details after a glass of wine."

The room tilted. Elena thought of dinner parties, of laughing too loudly, of Marcus refilling her wine glass. All those months of fatigue she'd attributed to stress, to aging, to the creeping realization that something was wrong with her marriage.

"The dog food," she said suddenly. "Barnaby's been lethargic for weeks."

Marcus shrugged. "Collateral damage. Animals are observant."

"So you poisoned our dog to cover your tracks."

"I'm a spy, Elena. Not a monster."

The absurdity of it—the spy who loved her, the husband who betrayed her, the man who poisoned their golden retriever to protect corporate secrets—rose in her throat like bile. She thought of that baseball game they'd watched on their first date, how he'd explained the infield fly rule with such patience, such earnest charm. All a cover.

"The vitamin bottles," she said, standing. "I kept the old ones. The ones you swapped out."

Marcus's face flickered—just for a second, the practiced neutral expression cracking.

"I had them analyzed," Elena continued. "After the headaches started. Last week."

Now the room was truly silent. Persephone shifted on the shelf. Barnaby whined softly.

"And?"

"Sedatives. Not placebos." She reached for her phone on the coffee table. "Marcus, you're not a spy. You're a middle manager who watched too many thrillers and drugged his wife to steal corporate secrets that probably won't even matter when the merger collapses."

"I did it for us," he said, voice rising. "For our future—"

"Our future?" She laughed, and it sounded like breaking glass. "You sedated me for six months to steal trade secrets. That's not espionage, Marcus. That's just pathetic."

The baseball game continued behind her, crowd roaring for a long-forgotten home run. Elena called the police, and somewhere in the distance, a real spy—if such things even existed—would have been ashamed to call Marcus one of their own.