My wife is upstairs, Serena Hill.
She is not coming down.
Upstairs: the soft creak of the floorboard outside the nursery, even though the nursery has been a guest room for three years. Upstairs: the faint scent of the lavender shampoo she stopped using last October, now replaced by something clinical and unscented. Upstairs: the low murmur of a television playing a black-and-white movie she’s already seen a dozen times. She watches the same endings because beginnings have become too unpredictable. my wife is upstairs serena hill