Vitamins in the Bathroom Cabinet

Every morning at 7:03 AM, she watched him swallow the vitamin D supplements with the grim determination of a man facing a firing squad. The orange prescription bottle sat beside their wedding photo, both gathering dust in the bathroom's fluorescent glare.

"Your hair's getting thinner," she said one Tuesday, running her fingers through the strands at his temple. It wasn't an accusation—just an observation, gentle as the touch itself.

He caught her hand. "Stress. The merger's killing me."

"I know."

But she knew something else too. The phone calls that stopped when she entered the room. The credit card charges for restaurants they'd never visited together. The sudden obsession with running, with vitamins, with anything that might arrest the slow decay of forty.

The real confrontation came on a Sunday, over coffee and the weekend paper. His phone buzzed—again, again, a third time in six minutes.

"Aren't you going to get that?"

"Work can wait."

"It's 9 AM on a Sunday."

He set his mug down with deliberate care. The ceramic met the table with a soft click, but it might as well have been a gunshot. "I can't do this anymore."

"Do what?"

"Pretend. That we're happy. That this is enough."

She waited. Outside, the neighbor's dog barked at nothing. Somewhere, a door slammed.

"There's someone else," she said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Eight months."

Eight months. She'd been taking vitamins too, back then. Folic acid, prenatal vitamins, until the miscarriage at eleven weeks that he'd cried about for exactly three days before going back to work. Before everything became about mergers and bonuses and proving something to people who'd forget his name before the ink dried on his pension papers.

"You're going to leave, then."

"I—I think so."

She nodded. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"What do you want me to say, David? That I'll beg? That I'll bear this humiliation for your comfort? I won't."

"You're taking this well."

"No," she said, and for the first time in eight years, let herself really see him—the thinning hair, the exhausted eyes, thevitamin-fueled performance of a man running from his own reflection. "I'm not taking it well. I'm just done carrying us both."