The dilemma

The heat has not broken in nine days. Your vegetable patch, the food that carries your family through winter, is wilting fast. The ration covers drinking and washing, nothing more. After dark the valve sits unwatched, and any extra you draw is spread so thin across four houses that no one could ever feel it.

Your options

1. Hold to the ration and let the patch die. It only works if everyone pays the same price.
2. Get the other three on the phone tonight. Maybe the ration needs to change for all of you, in the open.
3. Open the valve after dark. A few buckets across four houses, no one will ever feel it.