She got out of her bed and felt the breeze through her night dress from her open window. She walked down the hallway, half-asleep, and arrived in the baby’s room. She held the upset baby and sat in her rocking chair near the window and watched the street down below. Alice lived in a townhouse in the North Beach neighborhood with her husband and Ethel. Her husband, John, worked downtown as a lawyer. He has been working nearly seventeen hours a day for the past week on this one case. He never talks about his cases with Alice. They didn’t do a lot of talking. John was a tall, wide shouldered man, with brown hair and bright blue eyes. To his colleagues, he was a very stern man, but Alice new he had a soft heart.
Alice heard something from outside. It was a dog, not any of the dogs she recognized from her neighborhood. It was whimpering and scratching on the front door and when she got to the start of her stairs, she fell. The whole house started to violently shake. She fell down the stairs and felt her left leg break. She heard her dinnerware falling out of her cupboards and crashing, shattering in the other room. She thought of Ethel, in the room by herself, hopefully fast asleep in her bed. Alice tried her hardest to walk up the stairs through the shaking. After making it up the stairs, the shaking stopped. She did not hesitate and ran to the baby's room and she was