Vitamins for the Hollow

The alarm woke her at 4:30 AM—the hour of ghosts and insomniacs. Sarah swallowed her daily handful of supplements without water, the pills scratching her throat. Vitamin D for the windowless office. B-complex for energy she no longer felt. Magnesium for sleep that wouldn't come. She'd stopped asking what any of them actually did.

Her iPhone glowed on the nightstand, another notification from Marcus. *Can't make dinner. Working late again.* The third time this week. She stared at his contact photo—Marcus smiling at their wedding in Portugal, before the promotion, before he became whatever he was now.

By 7 AM, she stood before the glass pyramid in the financial district's atrium, waiting for her quarterly review. The structure caught the morning light, throwing distorted shadows across the marble floor. Inside, her reflection stretched thin, unrecognizable. A monument to ambition, her father had called it when they'd broken ground twelve years ago. Now it was just where she went to be measured and found wanting.

"You're operating at seventy percent capacity," her manager said, not looking up from his tablet. "We need you at one-ten, Sarah. The merger's coming."

She nodded, practiced and hollow. She'd stopped explaining that she'd given everything—her twenties, her creative writing workshops, the friend group that dissolved when she kept canceling. All of it fed into the pyramid scheme of upward mobility.

That evening, she found Marcus asleep on the sofa, still wearing his suit. His iPhone slipped from his hand when she touched his shoulder. He mumbled something about Q3 projections, eyes half-open and glassy.

"Marcus," she said, and he didn't respond. Not really. "We agreed to talk. About the IVF. About what happens next."

He blinked, surfacing slowly. "Right. Yeah. Just give me a minute to come back."

She watched him struggle to reassemble himself—genuine effort, she knew that much. But the version of Marcus who loved her, who read her bad poetry and held her through miscarriages, that man seemed to be haunting a body that kept showing up to work and paying half the mortgage.

"You look like a zombie," she said softly, and it wasn't unkind. Just observation.

"I feel like one," he admitted, finally sitting up. "But I keep showing up. Isn't that supposed to count for something?"

She looked at the vitamins on the counter, the phone lighting up with work emails, the city outside their window full of people like them—exhausted, overmedicated, climbing pyramids built by people who'd died centuries ago.

"I don't know," Sarah said. "I really don't know anymore."

But later, in bed, she reached for his hand across the sheets, and his fingers closed around hers. Whatever remained of them, whatever they'd sacrificed to the machine, they were still here. Still holding on in the dark.