Vitamin Padel

The orange sky of that Tuesday evening still haunts me. We were at the padel court, as usual—our Tuesday ritual for three years. Marcus was serving, his shirt already soaked through, when he collapsed.

'Just need more water,' he'd said, laughing it off that first time. But it wasn't dehydration. It was the pills—the vitamin D supplements the doctor insisted on after his last checkup. Or so he claimed.

I found the bottle later. Empty. And another. And receipts from three different pharmacies.

The fox appeared the night after the funeral. A scrawny thing, mangy coat and one ear missing, sitting on our patio like it owned the place. I shooed it away, but it kept coming back, night after night, staring at me with eyes that held an unsettling intelligence.

You think you know someone. Eight years of marriage, and I'd never seen him take more than a daily multivitamin. But there was so much I hadn't seen. The hidden bank accounts. The emails to her. The way he'd started flinching whenever I reached for his phone.

I threw out the oranges we'd bought together. They were rotting in the bowl anyway, soft and oozing, much like the trust between us. Sometimes I sit on the padel court alone, racket in hand, and wonder if he ever loved me or if I was just another supplement—something to fill the gaps in himself that he couldn't quite fix on his own.

The fox still comes. Tonight I left out an orange, segmented and waiting. We're not so different, really—scavengers picking through the wreckage, trying to find something worth keeping.