The Wellness Conference

The air in the ballroom smelled like expensive perfume and desperate optimism. Elena smoothed the front of her blazer, her palm sweating against the fabric. She'd spent three months preparing for this pitch—three months of ass-kissing and sacrifice presentations and pretending that incorporating crystal healing into corporate retreat strategies was anything other than predatory nonsense.

She was a fox in a henhouse, and she knew it. The irony wasn't lost on her.

"You look like you need this more than I do," said the man beside her, pressing a bottle of vitamin-infused water into her hand. His name was Marcus, something in middle management with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Last night was... something."

Elena had woken up in his bed. She'd woken up in a lot of beds lately.

"I'm fine," she said, which was what she always said.

"You sure? Because you look—"

"I said I'm fucking fine, Marcus."

The presentation began. Elena watched from the back as her boss—a man who genuinely believed he could manifest abundance through positive thinking—paced the stage like a caged bull, snorting about paradigm shifts and quantum leaps and seizing the divine masculine energy of market penetration. The audience nodded. They always nodded. They'd paid four thousand dollars each to be here.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her mother: *Your sister's pregnant again. Third one in four years. She says you should visit more.*

Elena's palm began to sweat again. She was thirty-eight, single, and selling snake oil to people who could afford to be fooled. Marcus's hand brushed against her thigh under the table—possessive, familiar, and utterly unwanted. She didn't move away.

The bull on stage roared with laughter at his own joke. Someone in the audience actually clapped.

Elena closed her eyes and saw a fox she'd once watched from her kitchen window, thin and mangy, rooting through garbage bins behind a restaurant. It had looked up at her, eyes bright and terrified and utterly alive, before darting into the darkness.

She stood up. She walked out of the ballroom. She texted Marcus: *I can't do this anymore.*

The air outside was cold and real. She breathed it in and for the first time in years, she didn't feel like she was performing anything at all.