I started to dwell on it anyway, or at least I think that’s what I was doing. I couldn’t be sure because the dwelling didn’t last very long. Apparently, my sleepiness-reduced serotonin levels were more than enough to convince me it wasn’t worth the time. In what was probably a span of no more than a second, I started drifting back into the comfortable darkness of sleep.

Of course, it was at about this point in time that the pain returned, just as sharp and even more unpleasant than before. This time it arrived in conjunction with a repeat of the raucous droning followed by a string of unintelligible speech. Neurons dutifully awakened inside my head, hurried through their electrochemical greetings with one another, then informed me that the elbow of the woman beside me in the bed was the instrument of my torture. Next, I was made privy to the fact that the droning noise had most assuredly been the ringer on the telephone.

However, my brain still couldn’t interpret the muddled string of syllables. A full translation being unlikely, and not being satisfied with simply getting two out of the three, it did the next best thing and gave me a short list of possibilities. The top pick among them was something akin to my wife telling me to answer the phone. Of course, after all of that thinking being foisted upon me, I was actually awake enough to lay money down that said pick was dead on the mark.

I groaned and sent my hand searching for the telephone on the nightstand. As I groped in the dark, using only one barely open eye for guidance, a passing thought rolled through my brain: If the thing had a longer cord, I could move it to Felicity’s side of the bed. It sounded like a good solution at the moment, but I knew she would probably just move it back. I tried to dismiss the idea, but something in the mind-fog kept reminding me that this was the reason she was still sleeping and I wasn’t.