It was waiting downstairs.

As you probably have learned from hard-won experience, dear reader, the things that blindside you and alter the course of your life (and not in a good way), the horrific things, don’t come accompanied by a dramatic swell of orchestral music and terse lines of movie script. There aren’t any vampires coming in through the windows at 1 a.m. No, the horrors pop up unheralded on a sunny, ordinary Wednesday morning out of a clear blue sky.