The Vitamin Wire

The coaxial cable lay severed behind the television, a copper snake she'd sliced through with kitchen scissors sometime after 2 AM. Elena sat on the floor now, thirty-four years old and vibrating with a particular kind of exhaustion that no amount of sleep could fix. On the coffee table: a bottle of B-complex vitamins, half-empty, prescribed by a doctor who'd told her to "manage her stress."

She'd suspected David was cheating for months. Not the usual signs—no perfume on collars, no late nights at the office. It was smaller. The way he checked his phone in the bathroom. How his laptop screen always dimmed when she walked into the room. Two weeks ago, she'd found a receipt for a private investigator in his wallet and then, paradoxically, caught him following her through the grocery store, pretending to examine cereal boxes while she bought lettuce.

They'd become spies in their own marriage, each one surveilling the other's unhappiness.

Her phone buzzed. David's sister: "Have you heard from him? He didn't show up for dinner with Mom."

Elena stared at the severed cable. She should have installed the cameras last month. She should have demanded answers instead of scissors. She swallowed a vitamin pill dry.

"I'm worried," the text continued.

Elena typed: "Me too." Then deleted it. She thought about the vitamin pyramid scheme David had fallen for last year—those monthly auto-shipments of supplements that cost $400 a month, how he'd tried to recruit her friends, how she'd stayed silent while their savings dissolved into powder and capsules. That was when she'd started feeling watched, or maybe that was when she'd started watching.

She'd hired the investigator. The investigator had found nothing. David had followed her because he'd found the investigator's invoice in her purse.

The email pinged. From a VPN address she didn't recognize: a security feed timestamped three hours ago. David, in what looked like an airport terminal, holding a sign with her name misspelled. He wasn't meeting anyone. He was waiting.

She'd been spying on someone who was waiting for her.

Elena dropped the vitamin bottle. The pills scattered across the floor like failed promises. Her hands shook as she typed his number, ready to confess everything—her surveillance, her paranoia, the way she'd been practicing to leave him for six months.

He answered on the first ring.

"I know," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still waiting."