The Wellness Regimen

Elena's vitamin D supplements sat on the counter, orange bottles lined like soldiers in an invisible war. Three a day, the doctor had said. Three a day to ward off the bone density loss that inevitably accompanied forty-five. She swallowed them dry, watching Julian in the bathroom mirror.

His hair was different today. He'd come home with it cut short on the sides, longer on top—the style their twenty-five-year-old daughter's boyfriend wore. But on Julian, with his salt-and-pepper temples and the deepening furrow between his eyebrows, it looked desperate. Like a man trying to negotiate with time.

"You like it?" he asked, not meeting her eyes in the reflection.

"It's fine, Julian."

"Fine. That's what you always say. Fine, fine, fine."

He slammed the drawer. The sound of it. That was how their marriage had been lately—slammed drawers, loaded silences, conversations that circulated the drain without ever quite reaching it.

Tonight was padel night. Every Thursday for six months, they'd gone to the club, playing mixed doubles with the same couple: Marcus and Sarah, whose marriage was apparently perfect. Marcus owned a crypto startup. Sarah taught yoga. They were tan and fit and laughed easily in a way that made Elena's chest ache.

"I don't want to go," Elena said, still facing the vitamin bottles.

"What? We can't cancel. They're expecting us."

"Why? Why does it matter what they expect?"

Julian turned. "Because it's normal, Elena. It's what normal couples do. They have activities. They have fun. They don't"—he gestured vaguely at the kitchen, with its scattered bills and unfinished arguments and those fucking vitamin bottles—"they don't sit around like this."

"Like what? Like two people who've stopped knowing how to talk to each other? Like two people who've spent twenty years building something that now feels like a cage?"

"We're happy," he said, but his voice broke. "We're happy, Elena. We just need to try harder."

She looked at him then—at his new haircut, his hopeful, desperate eyes, the way his shoulders slumped like he'd been carrying something heavy for too long.

"I stopped taking my vitamins last week," she said quietly. "I just wanted to see if you'd notice."

The silence stretched between them, vast and impossible to cross.

"What are you saying?" he whispered.

"I'm saying I don't know who I'm taking them for anymore. I'm saying I look at you and I don't know if we're building something together or just maintaining the facade. I'm saying padel with Marcus and Sarah isn't fixing anything. It's just—"

"Just what?"

"Just another vitamin. Just another thing we swallow because we're supposed to."

Julian's hand trembled as he reached for the counter. "I thought I was doing everything right."

"I know," she said. "That's the problem."

Outside, the summer sky turned purple, that perfect violet hour when the world seems suspended between possibility and regret. Somewhere in the distance, a padel ball struck the court—thwack, thwack, thwack—the rhythmic sound of a game that could never really be won.