The Vitamin We Never Took

The fluorescent lights hummed above us as Marcus slid the orange juice across the conference table. His wedding ring caught the light—gold band, silver screen, movie we'd both been watching for three years.

"You look tired," he said, not meeting my eyes. "Still taking those vitamins?"

I nodded, grateful for the anchoring lie. The B-complex sat in my pocket like a small metallic prayer, desperate hope in supplement form. Each morning, I swallowed them with the conviction that something microscopic could fix what was broken between us.

"They help," I lied.

Marcus's laugh was short, hollow. "Everything helps, doesn't it?"

We'd been friends once, in that way where friendship becomes something else without either person naming it. The transformation happened gradually—a text that arrived too late, a hand that lingered too long, a joke that stopped being funny and started being something else entirely.

The office glass reflected our silhouettes against the orange sunset bleeding across the sky. City dusk always made me think of endings, of boundaries dissolving, of what happens when the light changes and suddenly you can see what was always there.

"Sarah asked about you," he said finally.

My stomach hollowed. "What did she ask?"

"If I thought you were happy."

The silence stretched between us, thick and jagged. A thousand responses died on my tongue—truths that would shatter everything, confessions that would ruin marriages, dismantle careers, destroy the careful architecture of mutual pretending.

"What did you tell her?" I asked instead.

Marcus traced patterns on the table with his index finger. "I told her you were taking vitamins."

The absurdity of it caught in my throat—a laugh, a sob, something in between. We'd spent three years constructing an elaborate edifice of not-speaking, not-acting, not-being, and here we were, reduced to the mundane details of supplementation. The pills in my pocket suddenly felt like the punchline to a joke I'd been telling myself since the moment I'd first looked at him and thought: oh.

He stood up then, buttoning his jacket, the motion practiced and final. The orange light caught his profile, revealing the lines I'd memorized in secret, the geometry of someone I knew completely and not at all.

"See you tomorrow," he said.

"Friend," I wanted to say, but the word died before it could form.

Later, I'd swallow the vitamins with water from the break room fountain, their bitter coating dissolving on my tongue. Some things you take even when they don't work. Some nourishment is entirely theoretical.