Vitamin Deficiency

The vitamin bottle sat on her desk like a paperweight of missed intentions. Elaine had been taking them for three months—doctor's orders after the blood work came back with numbers that meant 'middle-aged woman in corporate crisis.'

She'd been running on fumes and caffeine since the merger announcement, her body moving through the workday while her mind remained somewhere else entirely. Somewhere with palm trees and no Outlook calendar. Her phone buzzed. David. Again.

'Can't talk,' she typed, though they both knew she could. She just wouldn't.

The cable from her monitor had started coming undone, exposing copper like a wound. She kept meaning to fix it. Like her marriage. Like her career trajectory. Like everything else she'd been bearing the weight of since she turned forty and realized this was it.

Her computer dinged: meeting in five minutes. The quarterly review. The one where they'd discuss 'streamlining' departments. The one where she might finally lose the job she'd spent fifteen years tolerating.

Her palm pressed against the desk, sweat slicking the surface. She'd had her palm read at a bachelorette party once, years ago. The woman had told her she'd have two great loves in her life. She'd thought she'd found the second one with David. But sometimes great love was just great convenience.

The vitamin D capsule sat small and innocent in her hand. A miracle of modern science, extracting sunlight into gelatin form for people who lived under fluorescent lights. She swallowed it without water.

Her screen flickered. The cable problem. She bent to fix it and saw it—there, under her desk, where it had been for five years: the small carved bear her daughter had made in summer camp, the one that said 'WORLD'S BEST MOM' in crooked letters. The daughter who now sent postcards from grad school and called once a month.

She picked up the bear, its wood smooth against her thumb. She'd been carrying so much for so long that she'd forgotten what mattered wasn't the weight, but what you were carrying it toward.

Elaine stood up. Left the vitamin bottle on her desk. Walked past the conference room. She'd bear the consequences tomorrow. Today, she needed to feel something like sunlight.