“But when I saw the price of water I nearly choked. In the last hour it had gone up tenfold. Buying some more information, I learned that there had been an attack, this time at a water treatment facility in Brookhurst. A corporation from a competing Karitzu paid a mercenary firm to blow it up, and raw sewage was now spilling into the aquifer.My God! Did this happen before my shower? What about the toilet? Christ, I may have just blown six hundred caps on a single flush!Hell, for the next few hours I couldn’t even afford to wash my hands.”

“Kate, I need to use the toilet,” he called through the door.“You’ve just had hours in the sea. Couldn’t you have gone then?”“Mum told me to get out of the water first.”“What, even the ocean?”“It’s wrong to pollute.” He tried to sound serious. ”

“I couldn’t remember the last time I had stayed up into the squeaky hours of the night because I couldn’t put a book down, and that was a tragedy.”

“There was no doubt in my mind that the man next to me was the same one who had been in my visions for the last six years. He was real, and he was at Luke's buying a whiskey? I almost felt cheated. For so long, I wondered what this vision was all about, feeling that it held some deeper meaning I would someday grasp. Yet, here I was at some seedy bar and the man in my dreams shows up and orders a whiskey. Now what? Save him from dying of inebriation?”

“We had never taken a shower together. We had never even been in the same bathroom together. "Don't flush," I'd said, "I want to look." What I saw brought out strains of compassion, for him, for his body, for his life, which suddenly seemed so frail and vulnerable. "Our bodies won't have secrets now," I said as I took my turn and sat down. He had hopped into the bathtub and was just about to turn on the shower. "I want you to see mine," I said. He did more. He stepped out, kissed me on the mouth, and, pressing and massaging my tummy with the flat of his hand, watched the whole thing happen.”

“I had been working hard at my book; it was one of those rare days of authorship when everything seemed to go right; the words flowed unbidden from my pen, and the time had passed unheeded, so that it was a shock to realise that I had been writing for some six hours.”