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of the room might work around it. Anyway." She lifted her glass in toast. "I had a good day. How about you?"

She sparkled, he thought. A trip to Home Depot, or wherever she'd been, and she sparkled like sunlight. "Well, I didn't buy any toilets, but I can't complain. I've got a good handle on the book, the story line, and managed to put a lot of it on paper." He studied her as he sipped. "I guess I understand your sink, after all. I saw you, you gave a tug. And the rest works around you."

"Can I read it?"

"Sure. Once I get it smoothed out some."

"That's awfully normal and untemperamental. Most of the writers I've known fall into two camps. The ones who plead for you to read every word as it's written, and the ones who'd put out your eyes with a shrimp fork if you glimpsed a page of unpolished work."

"I bet most of the writers you've known are in Hollywood."

She considered a moment. "Your point," she conceded. "When I was acting, script pages could come flying at you while you were shooting the scene. I actually liked it that way. More spontaneous, keeps the energy up. But I used to think, how hard can it be? You just put the idea down in words on paper. I found out how hard it can be when I started to write a screenplay."

"You wrote a screenplay?"

"Started to write. About a woman who grows up in the business-an insider's view-the rise and the fall, the scrambling, the triumphs and humiliations. Write what you know, I thought, and boy, did I know. I only got about ten pages in."

"Why did you stop?"

"I failed to factor in one little element. I can't write." She laughed, shook back her hair. "Reading a million scripts doesn't mean you can write one. Even a bad one. And since of that million scripts I've read, I've read about nine hundred thousand bad ones, I knew a stinker. With acting, I had to believe-not make believe, but believe. Janet Hardy's Number One Rule. It struck me it's the same with writing. And I couldn't write so I could believe. You do."

"How do you know?"

"I could see it when you started telling me about this new idea, about this new character. And it shows in your work, the words and the art."

He pointed at her. "You read the book."

"I did. I confess I intended to flip through it, get the gist so I wouldn't fail the quiz if and when you asked me about it. But I got caught up. Your Seeker is flawed and dark and human. Even when he's in superhero mode, his humanity, his wounds show through. I guess that's the point."

"You'd guess right. You just earned yourself another drink."

"Better not." She put a hand over her glass when he reached for the wine. "Maybe later, over dinner. After you show me the gym. You said it was close."

"Yeah, it is. Come take a look at this."

He gestured, then opened a flat-panel cherry door she'd admired. Lower level, she assumed and, since touring houses always appealed, started down with him.

"Nice stairs again," she commented. "Whoever built this place really... Oh. Man."

Struck with admiration and not a little envy, she stopped at the base. The slope of the hill opened the lower level to the rear of the house through wide glass doors and windows, and a small and pretty slate patio beyond, where the dog currently sprawled on his back, feet straight up, sleeping.

But inside, on safety mats over the wide-planked oak floor, stood the machines. In silence, she wandered, studying the elliptical trainer, the weight bench, the rack of weights, the recumbent bike, rowing machine.

Serious stuff, she mused.

An enormous flat-panel TV covered one wall. She noted the components tucked into a built-in, and the glass-front bar fridge holding bottles of water. And in the corner where the wood merged with slate rested a whirlpool tub in glossy black.

"Matt's work?"

"Yeah. Mostly."

"I'm more and more pleased with my instinct to hire him. You never have to leave here."

"That was sort of the idea. I like to hole up for long stretches. It was designed as a family room, but since my family doesn't live here, I figured why haul myself to a gym when I can bring the gym to me? And, hey, no membership fee. Of course, it cuts out being able to ogle toned and sweaty female bodies, but you've got to make