A/N: As requested by several readers, this is the first chapter of a sequel to my story "Renascence": as such, I strongly advise anyone who hasn't read that story to go and read it first, because both stories take place several years after Finn's passing, and deal with Rachel finding love again. That said, this is still a Finchel story, because, as you will ultimately find, his spirit is alive and well in her heart. Shantih.

The highway northeast out of Albuquerque stretched through flat, almost featureless desert, towards the Jemez Mountains on the horizon, and just beyond them, Santa Fe. Tom and Rachel were four-and-a-half hours out of the ponderosa pine and red rock country of Flagstaff, enjoying the mild September weather in the Triumph with the top down, singing their favorite songs, and looking forward to spending some time with the artwork of Santa Fe, before heading on to New York.

The cool, dry air felt good on her face, as did the sun. She glanced over at Tom, who looked relaxed behind the wheel, in his dark aviator sunglasses, curly hair blowing back, dressed like her, in a flannel shirts and jeans. She rummaged through a small bag.

"Want some red licorice?" she asked. He grinned.

"Sure, baby, thanks." It was his favorite road food; hers was gorp—good old raisins and peanuts-(without M&M's). He had been driving since Flagstaff, where they had stayed the night. She didn't ask him if he wanted to switch, mainly because it was only a half hour or so before hitting Santa Fe, and also because she had learned, on other road trips in the past two years, that he absolutely loved driving the open road for long stretches. She had to admit the Triumph was very comfortable, and fun to drive.

They made a pretty good team, she thought, handing him the licorice, and admiring the glint of the sunshine off the ring on her left hand.

XXXXxxxx

She waited for Tom to fall asleep before getting up herself. He had been up all night again, in a flurry of activity, tightening up some songs for Don't Look Back. Normally, he composed music at the piano, letting the music emerge from him spontaneously, to be written down later. Rachel loved watching him do this, and earlier in the day she had sat in the living room of his parent's house where he was working on the baby grand, writing down what she heard, and giving him feedback. But the creative streak extended way into the night, so Tom switched to a piano app on his iPad with headphones, so as not to disturb anyone. He didn't like using the app, which is why he had spent long nights sometimes in the rehearsal rooms at NYADA. Since he and Rachel had graduated, however, that option was no longer available, and he had grudgingly tried to adapt, sitting up in bed with her asleep beside him. She loved how he insisted having her at his side, even when she was asleep. He said it helped his creative process.

This particular time she awoke just as he finally settled to sleep, around 4:45. Slipping her black robe over her pajamas, she kissed him and headed for the kitchen to make coffee, only to see the light on and his mother already at the table, reading a medical journal, coffee cup at her elbow. She looked up with a smile.

"Bonjour, Rachel! You're up early for a Saturday."

"Good morning, Amélie," Rachel said, "Tom just now fell asleep. So I decided to get up now and avoid waking him later." It had taken a long time to get used to calling his parents by their first names (at their insistence), not to mention them having no problem with her sleeping with their son in his room when they visited.

"You are adults who love each other," his father had said, that first Christmas break. "That's all that matters to us."

Rachel poured herself some coffee and sat at the table.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you," she said. Amélie waved her hand.

"I'd love an excuse not to read this," she said, laughing. "I have so missed having a girl in the house again, even if it's only for a few weeks." She had jokingly complained that even the two cats, Jules and Jim, were male.

The two women had established a bond. Rachel was convinced Amélie believed she and Tom would get married, eventually, and had started treating Rachel more like a beloved daughter-in-law than a girlfriend. She went out of her way, for example, to inform Rachel about the family dynamics, the kind of information just a girlfriend would never get.

"Is all the planning done for your trip back to New York?"

"Yes," Rachel said, grinning, adding, "It's so nice to know we have paying jobs waiting for us!"

As Tom had suggested when they first fell in love two years ago, the two of them were going to drive to New York from San Clemente together in his Triumph. The producers of Funny Girl had shown immediate interest in Don't Look Back, when Rachel asked them to look the play over four months ago. Funding had been approved for casting, and workshops could start soon.

"Any plans yet for becoming our daughter-in-law?" A kind wink. Amélie and Bob already had two of them, Mary and Frieda, and a son-in-law, Hank. All were accomplished in their respective fields: Mary was a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Frieda an IT consultant, and Hank a molecular biologist. Rachel liked Mary and Frieda, both were in awe of her voice, long before they actually met-Mary and Bill had been to New York and had seen Funny Girl with Tom, and gave the soundtrack record to family members afterwards. But she was also very fond of the soft-spoken Hank, who fascinated her with tales about his work, which involved trying to design viruses that would specifically attack and destroy cancer cells.

Rachel had come to love Tom's family. He idolized his brothers. They looked much like Tom, eight-years-older versions of him, even down to the glasses, and they, in turn, loved their little brother. When in high school, Bill and Ted would drive Joanna, his older sister, and Tom to their respective schools and pick them up. Joanna was only two years younger, so their social circles sometimes overlapped when they were together in middle and high school. Tom, being so much younger, would sometimes want to want to be a big kid and hang out with them and their friends. Often he was told, good-naturedly, that he couldn't, but that didn't stop them (and Joanna also) from being very protective of him.

Joanna was a taller version of her mother, dark-haired, with strikingly delicate features, and shared the trademark Foley offspring deepest-of-blue eyes. She and Rachel had met only a couple of times, on holidays, but managed to hit it off anyway. She possessed a good mezzo-soprano voice, and sang in a classical choir group in San Francisco. At family gatherings, Rachel actually got her to trade-off songs with her, while Tom played piano.

Rachel especially loved and respected how Bill and Ted worked with their parents at the family business. Amélie and Bob were both general practitioners, while Bill specialized in gastro-intestinal medicine, and Ted was a pediatrician. Joanna was a physician as well, a neurologist, but lived in San Francisco. Even she would pitch in and consult on difficult cases. On Friday mornings, Bob and Amélie held special hours for the large Orange County Cambodian community, many of whose older members didn't speak English, and benefited being treated by physicians who spoke Khmer fluently.

The Foleys were a tribe of laid-back, compassionate overachievers. And, after two years, Rachel already felt like one of them. But she had to be honest.

"Tom hasn't asked me yet."

"Are you ready for him to ask?"

A surprisingly perceptive question. Rachel and Tom had spoken lightly of marriage, but, at the last minute, the conversation always seemed to veer away. Rachel assumed the pressures of graduating and developing Don't Look Back simply left them without the time to seriously consider getting married yet, but this summer, which they had both decided, together, to be about them, the question hadn't come up. She wondered, somewhat guiltily, why she hadn't mentioned it. Did it mean she subconsciously didn't want to get married?

She must have looked panicked, because Amélie gently took her hand.

"It's not that you two do not love each other, Rachel." She squeezed Rachel's hand firmly. "I'm his mother; I've known and loved him since he was conceived. And I can tell he loves you more than life itself." Then she smiled serenely. "But I also know you love my son just as much."

"You do?" Rachel asked, miserably. "So why haven't we really discussed it, then?" Amélie shrugged. "Je ne suis pas sûr—I'm not sure, but could it be due to thoughts about Finn?"

"What makes you say that?" A stabbing sensation filled her chest.

His mother looked wise and loving. "You were only seventeen when he proposed to you, and you were almost married twice. Mon Dieu, Rachel, I know how I felt when Bob proposed to me, and I didn't have everything snatched away so cruelly. How could that not affect you now? "

"Does Tom think I'm having doubts about marrying him? Because I don't."

"Rachel, he knows that. Of all my children, he is the most sensitive, empathique, you know? I'm sure he just wants you to be ready, so that when he does propose to you it will be a joyous occasion, free of the sadness of the past. He only wants to bring you joy."

"I know. He was just the person I needed. Oh Amélie, there are times when I think I don't deserve him."

"What you do not deserve," Amélie said, "is to be sad forever. You make my son happy. He makes you happy. You both deserve each other. Please let Tom bring you into our family. We love you as much as he does. "

Rachel smiled through her tears, and held Amélie's hands. She could see where Tom got his sensitivity.

"Could you tell me about Bob's proposal? Your whole story is so inspirational to me."

Amélie got up and poured them both more coffee. "Well, as you know, we both worked for Médecins Sans Frontières , or Doctors Without Borders. In fact, it was our first actual job as physicians.

"In 1975 we were sent to Cambodia during the refugee crisis. Thousands of people were fleeing the Khmer Rouge, who were slaughtering everyone as they came to power, and the MSF set up some field clinics inside Cambodia to care for them. I didn't know Bob before that, but he was assigned to my clinic because he had been an army medic in Vietnam, and had extensive experience in emergency medicine as a result. Our clinic was very near the Thai border, in the jungle on the eastern slope of the mountains." She paused, savoring the memory. " It was a beautiful place, at first, when the people were just a trickle, and before the rainy season. There was a mountain spring nearby with the purest, sweetest water I have ever tasted.

"I was attracted to him the moment we met." Rachel smiled. "He was good-looking, of course, and he spoke French, which he picked up in Vietnam also. And he taught me, a young Parisian city girl just out of medical school, how to triage, how to quickly make decisions on who could be saved, and who could not." A shadow came over her. "That became tres important, when the rainy season started and refugees just overwhelmed our little station: bullet wounds, mangled limbs from land mines, machete slashes, as well as the tropical diseases, like malaria and dengue fever. "

Tears appeared in her eyes.

"We lost so many people, Rachel, especially the elderly and the children…. It was so awful. The death, and the dampness. Everything was damp. There was no way to stay dry. I felt wet, filthy, and useless, crying myself to sleep every night. I thought about going home, but Bob kept telling me how well I was doing, and how these poor, desperate people needed me. Then, one night, he told me that he needed me, too."

Rachel recognized the look of love that came over Amélie then. It was the same look Tom gave her, and she felt a shiver.

"We became lovers." She adorably pronounced it "LUV-AIRS". "It felt, at times, that our love was the only decent thing to emerge from that place, because of what we saw: even Bob was shocked at the brutality of the Khmer Rouge, who, it seemed, looked like they were going to take complete control of the country. He said the Viet Cong were boy scouts compared to them.

"The worst day came towards the end of the rainy season. We hadn't seen any new refugees in several days, and managed to get caught up with the lingering cases in our tiny hospital. Bob was taking a nap while I finished my rounds. I was about to join him when some children came running up the muddy path, screaming for help. Behind them were some refugees, pulling two carts loaded with ten horribly injured people. They had been the victims of a mortar attack the day before. Oh Rachel, you have no idea how bad this was. We worked for a whole day and night trying to save them, but it was too late. None of them lived."

"Good Lord," Rachel said.

"We had never experienced anything like that up to then. I was heartbroken; six of the victims were young children. We were so overwhelmed that there was no time for tears. Both of us had been awake for almost 36 hours, and when it was over, everything caught up with me. I told Bob I needed to be alone for a while, and hiked to a natural clearing further up the mountain slope, which had a boulder you could sit on with a beautiful view of the jungle canopy below. A cool, dry mountain breeze eased the horrible dampness and for a few moments all I saw before me was a seemingly peaceful landscape, free of the inhumanity I had just witnessed. It was then that I finally started crying.

"I don't know how long I was up there, but when Bob eventually climbed up to join me, I was ready for his company. He said nothing, just sat next to me, arms around his knees, as the sun set behind us, throwing these beautiful purple shadows on the forest below. I lay my head on his shoulder. He asked me how I was, and I told him that, for the first time, I actually felt like a physician. Surprised, Bob asked me what I meant, and I said that I had finally been able to put aside any emotional response until the work was done, not letting my anguish get in the way. 'So you're saying you are ready to go down and do it again?' he asked. I nodded, and he kissed me. We sat for some time, listening to the growing night sounds of the jungle in the twilight. He took my hands and said he had something else to ask."

"He proposed to you then?" Amélie nodded, eyes shining.

"Oui. He told me I was the strongest, most beautiful person he had ever met, and that I could bring some love and joy, not only to him, but to that awful place as well, by agreeing to marry him."

"Oh, that's sweet. And you said yes, obviously."

"Oh oui, I did. But I added that we had to get married at the station, so that the refugees still there could enjoy the celebration as well. You see, one thing we did have in abundance at that station was decent food…and a case of Canadian whiskey!"

Rachel had a question. "Did he have a ring to give you then?"

She showed Rachel her hand. The engagement ring was simple gold, with one large stone, in what looked like an antique setting.

"It's beautiful…" Rachel murmured, letting the memory of Finn's ring wash over her, grateful that it no longer came with any pain.

"Thank you. It was his grandmother's. When Bob realized he loved me, he wrote his mother, asking her to send him the ring. It's all the more significant because his grandfather bought it in Paris before he returned from World War One. "

"Oh my!' Rachel gushed.

"Wait here," Amélie said, and disappeared for a moment, returning with a small framed photograph. "The day of the wedding, our Cambodian nurses took me to a pool fed by the spring, where I bathed and they did my hair, which was short, like it is now, and I dressed in my cleanest set of fatigues, because I had no civilian clothes—they would have rotted away in the damp." She showed Rachel the photograph, depicting her and Bob, dressed in stained, worn, green fatigues and boots, standing together, smiling, looking impossibly young, Amélie holding a small bouquet of tropical flowers. Sodden thatched roof huts were in the background, puddles everywhere, against a dark green jungle backdrop. "A refugee who had been a mayor of a local village that had been overrun by the Khmer Rouge and a Buddhist monk married us," she said, dreamily. "It was simple, something beautiful to celebrate amidst all that human misery."

"That's so beautiful," Rachel said. It felt good to be sitting there with Amélie, and somewhat understanding how she felt when Bob asked her to marry him. She had never told anyone about Finn's proposal in detail-not even Carole-and even though this was Tom's mother sitting across from her, she wondered if it would help talking about it with Amélie. Four years after Finn's death, there were still issues she needed to sort out, and it felt like she could trust Amélie Foley to at least listen.

"May I tell you about Finn's proposal?" she whispered. "I've never really talked about it with anyone, not even Tom, but I think I need to."

Amélie didn't look uncomfortable, but replied, "Only if you think you need to. That is so intimate a memory, and it surely must still hurt somehow."

"Yes, it hurts," Rachel said," but not for the reasons you might expect."

Amélie's eyebrow raised. "Then go ahead."

She told Amélie how he chose the auditorium, and originally wanted to recreate the setting of their first kiss. "Everything we did was steeped in symbolism: that stage, the first kiss, even things that we had said. Before our first kiss I told him he could kiss me if he wanted to, and it came to mean so much more than just the words strung together. Even the common theatrical expression 'break a leg' had deep meaning to us. Everything meant more than its face value. Being in love with him was like living in a world with heightened awareness that only he and I shared."

Amélie nodded, encouraging her to go on. Rachel felt so right, talking with her. She knew she wouldn't be judged for what she was to say next.

"Then he told me he had, basically, nothing in his life except me: no dream of playing football, no talents, no place to go other than staying in Lima, even the image of his father as a war hero had been dashed when his mother revealed that he had actually died of a drug overdose. The only thing he knew he had, the only inspiration in his life, was me. So he asked me to marry him."

"That is a lot of pressure, Rachel, for such a young girl. Did you say yes?"

Even four years later, it still hurt for her to say it: "Not right away. Oh Amélie, I thought it was crazy to get married so young."

At first Amélie showed no reaction other than just an encouraging nod. Her look softened considerably, however, when she could see the shame on Rachel's face.

"To my shame, I only accepted when I thought my own dreams had been dashed, when I didn't think I had gotten into NYADA, and had no backup plan."

Amélie shrugged. "But that is just timing and circumstances. It had nothing to do with the fact you both truly loved each other, non?"

"Yes. I knew I wanted to marry him, eventually. A lot happened after that, including a breakup, but we had reached a very good place right before he died." It was progress, she supposed, that she could talk about this now, four years later, without dissolving into tears.

"Then you need not feel any shame." His mother took both of Rachel's hands in hers. "It doesn't matter why he proposed, or why you accepted, as long as the ultimate fruit of that, a happy, stable marriage would have been the result. That would have happened, had he not passed away, right?" Even four years couldn't stop Rachel's tears then, as she just nodded.

"Every proposal has a love story. Your love story with Finn was touching and beautiful, and the only sad thing about it is that it was cut so short, through no fault of your own. But your love story with our son is beautiful and touching too. Bob and I admire how you care for each other."

"I love Tom," Rachel said, smiling, "With all my heart." Amélie returned the smile warmly.

"I'm glad. But I think you are fortunate also to have been loved by a beautiful man like Finn, who saw you as we see you. Let all your love stories strengthen and enrich you, Rachel. And enjoy their fruit." She stood up. "Speaking of which, let's have some breakfast—I can heat up some croissants, and we have real butter and fresh fruit. We can even eat on the patio—the sun is coming up! Let the men fend for themselves when they wake up, non? "

When Tom awoke later, around noon, she asked if they could take a walk on the beach after he ate. The sky was clear, perfect, with a cool offshore breeze. Rachel mentioned they had to be in Hermosa Beach earlier than they had planned. "Elena wants to take me to that bikini shop she likes before we leave for dinner." They were having dinner with some friends, Geoff Fielding and Elena Bosaic, then staying the night at their place.

"What's wrong with the one you have on?" Tom asked, grinning.

"Variety is the spice of life." He laughed, and they continued the walk, side by side.

"Tom?"

"Yes?"

"I want to name our first daughter Amélie."

She enjoyed his surprised, but very pleased look.

"What if we have a son first?"

"Then we'll have to keep trying."