"Is something wrong? You hardly touched your food."

"Just have some things on my mind, Rach. I just don't have much of an appetite right now." Laura answered as she forked around in her pasta.

"Is it about JC?"

Laura quickly looked up at her puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"I could cut the tension in the room with a knife, Laura. I know what happened the last time with you being stuck in the middle and I promise that I won't do that to you now. Especially since the two of you are working together and are even closer now then you ever have been." Rachel said as she sipped her wine. "I know it must have been a shock to see us hugging. I'm sure you got scared about things happening all over again, but believe me, its nothing like that."

"Really, it didn't bother me to see you two hugging. I was just surprised. And yes I was a bit worried about how things with the two of you would affect my working relationship with JC, but its really not a problem." Laura lied.  It bothered her down to her core to see them together.

"I hope not. I don't want to jeopardize anything for you and I certainly don't want to jeopardize our friendship again. I appreciate the fact that you kept your promise to me and have never told JC what really happened."

Laura sat and remembered back and could feel her stomach churning. She was disgusted with herself. "I made a promise to you. It would do more damage than good if I were to tell him about that now. So lets just leave it in the past."

Laura and Rachel finished dinner and headed back to the house. "I'll call you next week after you get back so we can hang out!" Rachel yelled as she was backing out of the driveway."

"Okay!" Laura yelled back.

As Laura walked into the house she saw a note sitting on the table in the foyer.

Laura,

I realize you may not want to speak to me right now, but I really need to explain all this to you. Please call me when you get home.

JC

Laura balled up the note and threw it into the trash before changing into a bathing suit and going into her backyard to soak in the hot tub. Laura let her head fall back against the head cushion and gazed up at the stars. After the jets stopped running, she could hear faint laughter in the distance and recognized Rachel's voice. Laura quickly got out and slowly walked over to her tall wooden fence to hear what was going on. As she looked through the crack of the fence she could see JC and Rachel sitting outside at the table.

Laura was straining to try and hear them speaking...Any word would have been nice to help her find out what was going on. She would notice Rachel leaning over the table and placing her hand over JC's. Laura could also see that JC was not physically responding to Rachel, which temporarily set aside her fears.  She soon noticed more laughter and looked through the crack and saw the two of them get up and walk inside the house.

She watched them walk through the kitchen and down the hallway. There could only be two places they could be going...The piano room or JC's bedroom. Laura's heart was pounding. When the coast was clear she quickly ran across JC's yard to the side of the house to see where they went. A light suddenly came on in JC's bedroom. Laura quickly ducked down.

"I didn't get a chance to get them back to you. They are right here in my closet. I put everything in a box for you." a male voice uttered.

Laura noticed that JC's window was open a crack and she continued to listen.

"I would have thought you would have thrown all this stuff away." Rachel said as she sat on the bed and looked through the box. "Oh my God. The diamond bracelet you bought me for my birthday?"

"Yeah."

"I thought I'd lost it."

"Buddy actually found it a little while ago. He came in the room with it stuck in his mouth."

Laura could see JC smiling as he watched Rachel continue to go through the box.

"What's in here?" Rachel said as she opened up a tiny box. "Oh, JC...I can't keep this."

"It's yours Rachel. Even though I gave it to you with the intentions of marrying you...I still gave it to you. You can do what you want with it, but as far as I'm concerned its yours." JC said as he handed the ring back to her.

Rachel held it in her hand and got up and walked over to JC. "I love you, JC. No matter what has happened in the past I never stopped loving you. I will always love you." she said as she went to hug him.

JC hugged her tightly, "I love you too. But its not the same love that I once had for you. I will always love you, there is no doubt about that Rachel, but its turned into a different type of love. Its going to take me a while to get passed all that has happened. So I need the space and time to heal."

"I understand. I just wanted you to know that." Rachel said as she ran her thumbs up his cheeks.

"I used to love when you did that to my face." JC smiled as he put his hands over hers and kissed her palms. The sprinklers suddenly came on and Laura was being sprayed with shots of cold water to her lower back. She couldn't hear what they were saying over the noises of the sprinklers. As she went to move closer her foot slid from beneath her "Ahhh.." she cried out as she went to the ground and ended up in a split position in the wet grass which was turning into mud.

Laura noticed she had yelled loudly and quickly got up to retreat back to her house. She ran through the sprinklers and slid again and fell onto her face. She quickly got up and ran to her fence quickly shutting it behind her so she wouldn't be seen.

As she reached her sliding glass doors she could see her reflection and scrunched up her face. She was covered in mud. She grabbed a towel from the lounge chair and set in on the floor in the kitchen before standing on it in her muddy flip flops and sliding across the floor to the laundry room where she took off her clothes and threw them in the washing machine.

Laura stood in the shower just letting the water run over her head while she thought about what JC and Rachel had said to one another before her snooping was cut short. All she could see was JC kissing Rachel's palms so lovingly. He seemed to look at Rachel the same way he would look at her when they were together.

When she got out of the shower Laura threw on her robe and went in the kitchen and made herself some tea. She walked down the corridor to her office and walked in the dark over to her desk to turn on the light. When the light switched on she screamed out in terror.