Bonus: new prologue
I'm trying this as the start to the book, instead of the Chapter I previously posted here.
Prologue
April 10, 2020
If Willa had been able to move her arm and lift her head she most certainly would have checked her fitness watch and marveled at how fast her heart was racing, how many calories she was burning, all by having collapsed on the sidewalk. She likely would have taken a sweaty selfie and humble-bragged about the achievement on Instagram with an assortment of hashtags designed to inspire a serotonin-boosting cascade of comments and double-clicks.
Maybe later. Right now she could not move and her mouth was filling with blood.
Her eyes weren’t working but her ears seemed to be. Sirens, footfalls, a distant police radio. All of that was outside of her head, she guessed. Inside was noisier. A woman’s voice hissed there: You wanted to be part of my world. You wanted this.
I’m not sure I wanted to end up face-down in the dark on a sidewalk in Midtown Atlanta, probably dying, Willa thought. I’m pretty sure I didn’t sign up for that.
Or maybe I did.
It’s true that she had largely turned her back on her normal life — the one where she was a 41-year-old, married mother of two who worked in graphic design and taught at mediocre gyms around the city — to become a star instructor and manager at the ultra-exclusive fitness studio down the street from where she now lay, cheek to concrete, limbs like obstinate stone.
But Willa hadn’t wanted everything to fall apart. She hadn’t wanted things to go so horribly, tragically wrong.
Her pulse pounded faster, which seemed impossible. Damn, she thought. I must be getting all kinds of “way to go” alerts from the fitness app on my phone.
My heart is probably gonna explode.
Willa would have laughed darkly at the absurdity of the situation if only she could have controlled her mouth, and also if she could have been sure she still had teeth.
“I’m sorry,” she would have said next. “I’m sorry for everything.”
(Then you would go to Chapter I, which is now subtitled “April 10, 2019” to show we are starting from the beginning of Willa’s FitFams’ story and going chronologically from here on out.)