The Vitamins We Swallow

Elena placed the orange **vitamin** tablet on her tongue each morning with the same precision she applied to everything else since Greg started coming home late. Three months of this ritual, three months of his mumbled explanations about the merger, the deadline, the project that never seemed to end. She swallowed with a sip of **water** from the glass on her nightstand, watching her reflection in the mirror. Thirty-eight years old and she'd become the kind of woman who noted her husband's arrival times in a bullet journal.

The **baseball** tickets for tonight's game sat on the kitchen counter — fourth row behind home plate, Greg's Christmas gift to her six months ago. Before the merger, before the late nights, before he started leaving his phone face-down on the table whenever he walked into the room. She'd checked his location twice last night. Both times, his phone showed him at the office downtown.

But Elena had followed him yesterday. She'd watched him walk into a residential building on 42nd Street, climb to the third floor, and stand on the fire escape for twenty minutes, smoking and watching the street below. She hadn't approached him. Instead, she'd gone home and pretended to be asleep when he finally crawled into bed at 2 AM, smelling of someone else's perfume.

She found the **cable** ties in his jacket pocket while doing laundry this morning — professional grade, the kind contractors used. But Greg worked in software. He didn't use cable ties. Unless he was tying things together. Or tying things up. Or tying things down.

The realization hit her with the weight of something she'd always suspected: the man she married was a **spy**. Not the romantic kind, not James Bond with a martini — but something smaller. Corporate espionage, maybe. Selling trade secrets to the competition. Or worse: selling them to the government, or someone else entirely. The late nights weren't an affair. They were something that could get them both killed.

She placed the vitamin bottle back in the cabinet. Tonight's game would tell her everything. Greg would either show up with popcorn and excuses, or he wouldn't show up at all. Either way, Elena would finally know whether she was a wife or an accomplice.