The Vitamin Trade

Marlena noticed the vitamin bottle on his nightstand first. It wasn't their brand - a generic orange label with no ingredients listed. Her palms started sweating whenever she saw him swallow those capsules, his throat moving in a way that felt practiced, deliberate. She'd been running six miles every morning since their tenth anniversary, trying to outrace the suspicion that had settled in her chest like a dull ache.

"Another tournament?" she asked when he packed his baseball bag for the third weekend that month.

"City league, babe. You know how it gets." He kissed her forehead, but his eyes darted to the bedroom door where the vitamin bottle sat.

The following Saturday, she followed him. Not to any ballpark, but to a downtown parking garage where he met a woman in a grey sedan. Marlena watched from behind a concrete pillar as her husband exchanged the vitamin bottle for an envelope thick with cash.

She didn't confront him. Instead, she started researching. He wasn't having an affair. He was a corporate spy - not the glamorous kind, but a mid-level accountant selling their company's proprietary formulas to competitors. The vitamins were just capsules containing microdots of stolen data. His baseball weekends were dead drops and handoffs.

That night, she packed her things while he slept. In the bathroom, she found twelve more vitamin bottles, each labeled with different dates. She took one - insurance.

"The divorce papers will arrive Monday," she told him at breakfast. "And I've already contacted your company's legal department."

His face went pale. "Marlena—"

"Save it." She placed the vitamin bottle on the table between them. "I know what you've been running from. And I'm done being your cover story."

She left him sitting with his coffee, his baseball career over before it began, realizing too late that some betrayals are worth more than any price tag.