I suppose that demonstrates advanced learning, eh? I guess I'll bathe him before dinner."In the evening Martha asked whether I'd be in the office on F...riday and whether she could come and talk to me 'about a problem.' We set it up for 10:30 — that would give me time to go through whatever the day's absence had heaped on my desk. I wondered what her 'problem' was.There was plenty to throw away when I got to the office, but I'd transferred the paper to the trash can within an hour and was. " Luke," I responded, raising my voice, and then wincing as the soap I'd been using to wash my hair ran into my eyes. I released an irritated growl, quickly rinsed off under the water and then pulled the curtain back again to glare at him. "Intruding?" I demanded. "I haven't seen her in months! Do you realize that my whole life the longest I've gone without seeing her is a week? And I didn't even realize how much I'd missed her until ten minutes ago, and now you're saying she's an intrusion?. “Is she scared of water?” Sara wondered.“Whatever it is, it’s something my twat ex-husband didn’t want to tell me,” said Rachel grimly. She was getting out her phone.“Patrick!” Rachel made herself consider he had at least cared enough about Fiona to dump her here. “I’ll keep her. I promise, whatever it is I won’t throw her out. So tell me.”“You’re a special person Rach,” he began with typical blarney, “the special person she needs. Fiona has a bit of an anomaly, you might say, that makes things. I'm not sure it's possible to be too beautiful. But assuming it is, what problems does being too beautiful cause? What are the consequences when you step over the line from being breathtakingly beautiful to destructively beautiful?" Mock me if you will. Let me give you just the short list because there are so many ways extreme beauty can be insidious."It made me complacent. Raw beauty allowed me to achieve so much I began to feel I didn't need anything else. I didn't need to develop any skills.