What We Don't Say

The iPhone arrived three weeks after Maya's funeral, delivered in a padded envelope I'd have sworn I hadn't ordered. When I turned it on, her face lit up the screen—smiling, drunk on that last night in Barcelona, some bar with walls the color of dried blood. I'd taken that photo. I'd pressed the button.

I thumbed through her notes app expecting to find passwords, unfinished drafts, the ordinary debris of a life interrupted. Instead I found lists: vitamin D3, 5000 IU daily. Magnesium glycinate before bed. B-complex with lunch. This wasn't wellness culture bullshit. This was the meticulous architecture of someone fighting a war in private.

She'd never said a word. We'd talked about our terrible bosses, our dating app fatigue, our slow creeping mortality in the abstract sense people do at thirty-one over overpriced wine. Never once had she mentioned that she was stacking supplements like an arsenal.

I sat on my balcony that night watching the city's orange glow swallow the sky when something moved below—a fox, its coat the color of rusted iron, padding through the alley like it owned the broken pavement. It paused, looked up at me with eyes that held zero pity for anything, and I thought: this is what the world is. Wild things and broken things and things that don't tell you they're dying until they already have.

The fox vanished into darkness. I went back inside and typed into the search bar: what happens when you stop taking vitamin D. The answer came back in seconds—because of course we live in a world where information is cheap but wisdom is nonexistent, where friendship means scrolling through someone's digital ghost trying to piece together the truth they never spoke aloud.

I deleted the search history. Some secrets deserve to be kept, even in death.