The Wellness Watcher

Elena should have been running—her therapist said it would help with the anxiety—but instead she sat in her car, engine idling, staring at the building where she'd spent the last three years selling happiness in capsule form. VITALITY Corp, makers of the breakthrough vitamin supplement that promised to fix everything your life lacked.

She'd come in early to gather her things before security arrived. Two hours ago, she'd finished forwarding the documents to the Journal: the raw data showing their flagship product was no more effective than a placebo, the internal emails laughing about the desperate customers they hooked, the memo about targeting lonely women over forty.

Her iphone buzzed on the passenger seat—Mark, again. 'Please pick up. We can fix this.'

Her husband had no idea she'd been the one to feed the Times the lead. He worked in PR for the company's biggest competitor. The irony wasn't lost on her: she'd spent their entire marriage spying on his industry, sleeping with the enemy, and now she was about to become the very story he'd have to spin.

She remembered the moment it started to crack—the glossy brochure showing a woman who looked like Elena's mother, radiant and wrinkle-free at fifty-five. 'She took it every day,' the brochure claimed. But Elena knew better. She'd seen the medical records. That woman had died of ovarian cancer at forty-nine, her face Photoshopped onto a body twenty years her junior.

The bear market of the soul, her grandmother would have called it. Trading authenticity for security, then losing both.

Elena put the car in gear. She wasn't running away, not exactly. She was running toward something harder: a life without the easy lies, a marriage that might not survive the truth, a career in ruins. But for the first time in three years, when she looked in the rearview mirror, the woman staring back looked like someone she might actually want to know.