Vitamin Orange

She found him in the kitchen at 3 AM, standing before the open refrigerator in nothing but his boxers, the fluorescent light casting his silhouette in blue. He held a carton of orange juice—pulp-free, the kind she bought because he complained about the texture—swirling it like a cheap Cabernet.

"Can't sleep?" she asked, though the question was unnecessary. Neither of them had slept properly since the miscarriage, since the silence between their sheets had grown heavier than any body.

"Thirsty." The single word hung in the air like something fragile. He set the juice on the counter and reached for a glass, filling it with water from the tap instead. She watched his throat move as he drank, the rhythmic gulp that used to comfort her now seeming mechanical, as if his body were simply executing its biological imperative without his consent.

"Dr. Chen called," she said, leaning against the doorframe. "They want to try a different protocol. Something about vitamin absorption, how grief depletes—"

"I don't want to take anymore vitamins." He turned to face her, and she saw how the refrigerator's light carved hollows beneath his eyes, how his stubble had grayed at the temples. "I don't want to optimize anything. I don't want to get better at this."

"At what?"

"At existing." He picked up the orange juice again, studied the expiration date. "Did you know that vitamin C deficiency causes sailors to bleed into their skin? Scurvy. The body literally comes apart at the seams when it forgets what it needs."

She crossed the room and placed her hand over his, where it gripped the carton. His skin was cold. "We're not sailors, David. We're not lost at sea."

"Aren't we?" He met her eyes then, and something broke behind his gaze—some dam that had been holding back everything they'd refused to say since the ultrasound had shown only static. "The water rose up, Mara. It just kept rising, and we kept trying to bail it out with vitamin supplements and sleep schedules and—" His voice cracked. "And now we're just treading."

The refrigerator hummed between them. She thought about all the mornings they'd sat across from each other, pretending that coffee and orange juice and multivitamins could fix what was fundamentally broken, that if they just consumed enough of the right things, their bodies would remember how to want each other.

"Maybe," she said softly, "we stop treading."

"And drown?"

"And float." She took the carton from his hand and set it on the counter. "Sometimes the only way out of the water is to stop fighting it. Let it carry you somewhere else."

For a long moment, he didn't move. Then his shoulders dropped, something releasing in the set of his jaw. He reached for her hand, his fingers threading through hers, and for the first time in months, the contact didn't feel like consolation. It felt like something real.

"Okay," he said. "Okay."

They stood together in the blue light of the open refrigerator as dawn began to gray the windows, two people finally learning that some things couldn't be fixed—only survived.