It was tough going at first, dragging herself out of bed before Stan and the boys were up, but she did it, and now that she had established a routine, she loved it. This was her time. She listened to audiobooks, music, or her new obsession: true-crime podcasts. That particular morning, it was music. Through her earbuds, a now-defunct pop group of women was seductively trying to convince their man not to go to work. Patricia began to quietly sing along, unaware that she was doing it. It wasn’t the first time. At the gym, she only realized she was doing it when she got an odd, amused smile from someone on the machine or treadmill next to hers. She would stop and apologize with an embarrassed grin, but with no one around, her volume grew.

She alternated her workouts. Some mornings she went to the gym. Other mornings, like this one, she would take long power-walks, which were her favorite. Once she had explored her own neighborhood, she began branching out to explore others. That’s how she found Meadowgate. Over the past two decades, Atlanta had become blanketed in subdivisions that offered only four different models of homes, creating streets that repeated themselves over and over.

Not Meadowgate.

There was variation to the upscale homes. The lawns were bigger, unlike other subdivisions where the houses sat on small lots with only patches of grass masquerading as front and back yards. The wide lawns of Meadowgate and the varying houses reminded her of the neighborhoods in Indiana where she grew up.

That morning, the thick fog hid the houses on Willow Lane from view, which was a bummer, but Patricia reminded herself that it wasn’t about the houses; it was about the ten pounds.

. . . But they were such nice houses.

Willow Lane sat in a secluded corner of Meadowgate, like a mini-subdivision unto itself.

Out of curiosity, she had looked into the asking price of the house under construction at the end of the Willow Lane. The previous home had burned down earlier in the year. She didn’t know how it had happened, and no, she and Stan weren’t thinking about moving. It was just for fun but turned into a bucket of cold water. They would never be able to afford a house on Willow Lane.

If only we didn’t have two bright sons who had to go to college, she thought and laughed. She would take Ricky and Mason over a house on Willow Lane any day.

Still, it was nice to dream.

The combination of her wandering thoughts, the music blaring through her earbuds, her absent-minded singing, and the dense fog, caused her to almost pass right by the object in the street.

At first, it looked as though someone had dropped some clothes in the middle of Willow Lane. It was the hair that caught Patricia’s attention.

These weren’t some discarded articles of clothing.