It’s been a week. Actually, it was a week at about 7PM last night. At 7PM, a week ago, I emerged from the bedroom where I’d been holed up trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Just in from work, my husband handed me the mail. A large red envelope was addressed to me. Trying to make out the return address, the first name was an illegible scrawl, but the last name was Jones, the town was ours and we know Jonses in our almost-a-town. I opened the card.

The card was large and unsigned, which I noticed after some folded papers slid into my lap. I opened the papers and in the right-hand corner was the bold signature of a name I recognized. No, in fact, it was not the Joneses. This person, a man, is not someone I knew, but someone who’d tried contacting me in recent months.

Looking over my shoulder, my husband saw what I was looking at and asked for the papers. I gave them to him, based on what I knew so far: the card-sender (red is so subtle, BTW) was a deluded man who called to rant, rave and accuse my husband of having an improper relationship with his wife, an old high school friend whom my husband had “friended” on Facebook.

I held my hand out waiting to get the papers back for what seemed like an eternity as my husband read page after page. He was “screening” and protecting me from the lunatic. Inside, something kicked into gear and went on high alert. If my husband refused to hand those papers back to me? I was going to be angry.

Suddenly, my husband made a decision. “You simply cannot see these, they are just too upsetting,” he said as he left the room. Seconds later, I heard the sound of the paper shredder in action and the atmosphere in the room suddenly turned supercharged.

Seriously, Houston. We do have a problem.