The Vitamin Thief

Elena first noticed the change in Marcus's hair during the Monday morning briefing. The thinning crown he'd obsessively complained about for three years had suddenly thickened, the strands gleaming with an unnatural vitality that made her stomach tighten with suspicion.

They'd been friends since she'd joined the pharmaceutical division two years ago—he'd shown her the best coffee machines, warned her about the micromanager in Accounting, shared his stash of vitamin D supplements when the fluorescent lights gave her headaches. "Growth," he'd called it, sliding the amber bottles across his desk. "For your bones, your mood, everything."

Now she sat in her car during lunch, scrolling through the patent database she'd secretly accessed, her hands trembling. The formula she'd spent eighteen months developing—a revolutionary peptide therapy for alopecia—had been filed two weeks ago. Under a competitor's name. The filer's contact information matched Marcus's home address.

The vitamins he'd given her. The comments about her work, always asking detailed questions about the peptide structure. The long hours he stayed after she left, supposedly catching up on emails. He wasn't just a friend; he was a spy, planted by their biggest rival, eating her research from the inside while pretending to care about her career.

She returned to her desk to find a vitamin bottle on her chair—peach-flavored, his favorite. A note in his familiar scrawl: "Thought you could use these. You've looked tired lately."

Elena swept the bottle into her purse. She didn't confront him. She didn't cry. She called corporate security, then legal, and finally, a headhunter at a firm where her former mentor now worked. The vitamin bottle went into an evidence bag. The friendship went into the drawer where she kept other things she'd outgrown: her wedding dress from a marriage that lasted eleven months, the acceptance letter from the PhD program she'd abandoned for this salary.

"Your hair looks different today," Marcus said when she passed him in the hallway on Friday, his smile faltering as security escorted him from the building. She didn't respond. Some things, she'd learned, were better left unsaid.