Poor Ulises has to work a lot of overtime because of all the terrorism alerts surrounding the New Years holiday: he hardly has any days off at all, just a few odd hours here & there to crash at Heather's place. He tells her several times how sorry he is he can't be with her on New Years Eve, all cops are working that night, it's mandatory. Heather feels so sorry for him, working so hard that he's always exhausted. His hours are long & he comes home in the darkest hours of the night, and sometimes whatever it is he has to see & do out there has so affected him that he holds her fiercely & buries his face in her hair. His job is dirty & dangerous & Heather worries very much about him while he's doing it. When he finally gets a full day off and wants to spend some time outside the house, she suggests they see a matinee & try the Indian restaurant she 'discovered'.

Heather's not a big movie fan, but now that Byron Palisades is her main source of income, she'd like to see one of his movies. And she knows Ulises likes at least one of his movies.

But why waste this precious time together watching people on a colony on Mars take drugs to escape the boring reality of living on a Mars colony, when they can be kissing? Heather considers buying a tv set: they could just as easily be doing this at home, she thinks. Without having to find a babysitter, which Ulises always insists on.

Heather knows he's trying this restaurant just to please her: inside, he's sceptical. But she knows him, he likes spicy food, so he'll like this better than he realises. Though the food was new to her when Zach inroduced her to this place, the music wasn't. Heather's got an extensive cd collection with selections from around the globe and she loves classical sitar as much as she loved listening to Jerry Garcia play. Ulises, however, is just hearing it for the first time, but of course, being her soulmate, he likes it as much as she does on first hearing it.

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