The Wellness Breaker

The orange peel lay on the conference table like a small, discarded sun. Sarah stared at it while her boss, David, droned on about Q4 targets for their vitamin supplement line. She'd stopped taking the company's products three months ago—somewhere around the time her mother got sick, somewhere around the time she realized wellness was mostly marketing.

She adjusted her hat, pulling the brim lower. The gray was showing at her temples again. At thirty-seven, she was the oldest person in this meeting room full of twenty-somethings in athleisure, all bright-eyed and caffeinated, none of them yet understanding that you couldn't supplement away grief.

"Sarah? You with us?" David's voice cut through her thoughts.

"Sorry. Long night." She gestured vaguely at the charging cable snaking across the table toward her laptop. "Battery died mid-presentation prep."

This was technically true. It was also true that she'd spent three hours on the phone with her brother, arguing about whether to move their mother to hospice. The cable—pliant black rubber, prone to fraying at the ends—was the only thing tethering her to this room, this job, this version of herself she'd outgrown.

"Well, we need your numbers on the new immunity booster," David said, already turning back to the whiteboard. "Big push coming. Cold and flu season, plus all that anxiety about the economy. People are desperate for control."

Desperate. The word hung in the fluorescent air. Sarah thought about the orange—how she'd sectioned it in the breakroom, the juice staining her fingers, how for a moment it had smelled like her mother's kitchen. How she'd almost cried over a piece of fruit.

She looked at the vitamin bottles arranged on the conference shelf like trophies. Promises in plastic. The thought struck her with sudden, crystalline clarity: She was selling insurance against a universe that didn't care if you lived or died. And somewhere, her mother was dying anyway, despite everything.

"Sarah?" David asked again.

"I quit," she said.

The room went quiet. The cable pulsed with electricity.

"What?"

"I can't do this anymore. Any of it." She stood up, knocking her chair back. "I'll send my files from home."

She walked out with her hat in hand, the smell of orange still on her fingers, finally ready to sit with her mother at the edge of everything and not try to fix it. Just be there while it broke.