Melanie quickly but carefully unlocked her front door. She was mindful, as she always was, that her husband might be lying in wait to kill her. Although she felt fairly confident she'd already won her and Jonathan's game of cat and mouse with her latest gambit, you could never be too careful.

She reached into her purse and withdrew a small pistol, before standing to side of the door and opening it. Then she dove inside, rolled forward, and came to her feet in a crouch, sweeping her weapon left and right.

The living room was clear, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the interior door to the garage in the dining room was slightly ajar. She whirled to face the door, and then approached in slowly, her head on a swivel.

Again, she stepped to the side of the door, and slapped it with her palm to make it swing open. A small mirror that she kept in her purse, when angled just right, showed her no one was inside without her having to leave cover.

Cautiously, she stepped down into the garage. To her surprise and bewilderment, she found that a large plexiglass enclosure had been set around a folding table inside. Two gaps had been cut in the plexiglass, through which two telescopic painter's poles had been inserted. One had a sharp knife duct-taped to the end, and the other hand the grabber she used to reach objects on high shelves tied to it, with a wire running down the pole to control the jaws.

To her dismay, on the table behind the plexiglass she saw an opened Amazon box, the very one she'd prepared earlier that day. Beside it on the table lay the note she'd put inside, along with a rock of the appropriate weight to represent its contents.

Bomb. You are dead, the note said.

She frowned in consternation. Except Jonathan clearly wasn't "dead". He must have noticed something off about the package, and gone to Home Depot to construct this makeshift blast shield. It wasn't a real blast shield that would protect you from an explosion, perhaps -- but then, neither was a note and a rock a real bomb.

As she was about to turn away, a pair of strong arms seized her from behind. She felt the dull, rounded edge of a butter knife slide lightly across her throat, the coldness of the metal making her shiver.

"Where did you come from?" she whispered, hoarsely, her heart pounding.

"Shh, you can't talk. I just slit your throat." Jonathan whispered back, affectionately, and pulled her against him. He kissed her neck gently, and added, "I took the shelves out of the tool cabinet so I could fit inside, hid the shelves and the tools, and then I just waited. For hours."

Melanie let out a blissful sigh, melting into the "deadly" embrace of the man she loved -- the man she'd "killed", and been "killed" by, dozens of times over.

"Aww..." she said, tilting her head up to look at him smiling down at her. "You really know how to make a girl feel special."