Vitamins for the Soul

The fox appeared at dusk, trotting along the edge of the infinity pool where Sarah sat with her feet dangling in the water. She'd been here for hours, staring at the reflection of the Santa Monica mountains as they dissolved into twilight, nursing a gin and tonic that had long since gone watery.

She and Marcus had fought again. Same argument as always—about the future, about timing, about whether his career in Chicago justified her leaving everything she'd built in Los Angeles. He wanted her to move by Christmas. Christmas was eight weeks away.

The fox paused, watching her with intelligent amber eyes. Sarah found herself speaking to it, as if it were a therapist or a particularly judgmental friend. "He thinks I'm being irrational. Says I can find another job, another life."

The fox tilted its head, then moved on toward the complex's garden beds, probably hunting something smaller and slower than itself.

Sarah sighed and pulled her legs from the pool. Her skin was prune-whited and cold. She walked back to her apartment, where a takeout container of lukewarm spinach sat on the counter beside Marcus's collection of vitamins—his meticulously organized morning ritual that he refused to abandon, even when he was angry enough to sleep in the guest room.

She dumped the spinach into the trash. Picked up the vitamin bottles. Calcium, Vitamin D, Omega-3, B-complex. Each one a promise to a future he was planning with or without her.

The phone rang. Marcus.

"I'm sorry," he said before she could speak. "I hate that we keep doing this. I hate that something good requires something else to end."

"That's adulthood, isn't it?" Sarah replied, surprised by her own steadiness. "Growth requires loss. Vitamins require swallowing something bitter to get what you need."

"Is that what I am? Bitter medicine?"

"No. You're the nutrients. You're what I need. But this move—this is the pill I can't seem to swallow."

Silence stretched between them, three thousand miles of fiber optic cable carrying the weight of everything unsaid.

"I have an idea," Marcus said finally. "Not about Chicago or Los Angeles. About us. About how to stop losing the same fight in different ways."

Outside, the fox reappeared, sitting in the courtyard beneath Sarah's window, watching her through the glass. Waiting for something, patient as moonlight.

"Tell me," Sarah said, and for the first time in months, she actually meant it.