It was difficult for Mary to admit that most of her workout consisted of exercising poor judgment. Not in the gym. In life. Small decisions that seemed harmless until they accumulated like miles on a road she hadn’t meant to travel. Tonight’s example was the shortcut. She had taken it before — a narrow road that cut through farmland and saved twenty minutes on the drive home. Technically it wasn’t even on the map anymore, but the pavement was still there if you knew where to look. Mary turned onto it just after sunset. The headlights stretched ahead of her, illuminating cracked asphalt and tall grass whispering in the wind. Halfway down the road she realized something was wrong. The mailbox that marked the old farmhouse was gone. The leaning oak tree was gone. Even the bend in the road seemed… smoother than she remembered. Mary slowed the car. “Probably just new paving,” she said aloud, though no one was there to hear it. The farther she drove, the quieter the world became. No distant highway noise. No porch lights in the distance. Just the road and the steady hum of the engine. Eventually the pavement narrowed into a single lane. Mary frowned. That had never happened before. She checked the rearview mirror. The road behind her stretched straight and pale in the headlights — familiar, comforting. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe this wasn’t the shortcut.” She pulled the car to the side and turned the wheel. The headlights swung around, illuminating the way back. Except now the road looked… different. Not cracked. Not narrow. Not even paved. Just a long pale strip of earth running across an empty field. Mary blinked. She stepped out of the car and walked a few paces back, the gravel crunching softly under her shoes. For a moment she wondered if she had imagined the whole thing — the farmhouse, the tree, the bend in the road. Memory had a way of editing things. She stood there in the cooling air, staring at the place where she thought she had come from. The road behind them disappeared, as if it had never been there at all.