A/N: Sorry I skipped a week. I was so tired last Friday night. I'm taking this slow because I feel it's important to get into the heads of the characters and understand their struggles and what they're feeling. It isn't easy to love someone when they've hurt you in the worst way. You can't just turn love on and off like a faucet, doesn't work that way. You also can't just forgive the past that easily, doesn't work that way either. There's a lot for them to work through here. Remember, these two hurt each other in different ways and they also reacted to that hurt in different ways. They not only have to forgive each other but they have to forgive themselves too. There is no way to forgive someone else if you can't even forgive yourself. Their biggest problem has always been communication. Baby steps...

Cuddy and Sharon were sitting on a bench at the park watching Hannah and Rachel on the swings. As the girls enjoyed their playtime together, their mothers were deep in conversation.

"I can't believe you're writing him a letter."

"What's so hard to believe?"

"It's just that you swore you'd have nothing to do with him ever again and yet here you are telling me you're writing him back."

"I don't know what came over me. Maybe I just need some closure."

"Yeah but Lisa this isn't closing anything, in fact if anything it's opening it all over again. Don't you see? If you write to him, you're basically giving him the green light for communication. There's no telling what will happen. Are you ready for this?"

Cuddy thought about her friend's words. Sharon was right, knowing House it wouldn't end with a letter back to him, he might want to reply back and then what?

"You don't think I should write him back?"

"That's not what I'm saying. Lisa, I think you should do whatever you think you need to do but don't think you can just write a letter to him and be done with it. This is House, the guy you've had a relationship with for over twenty years. Look I want to club this guy over the head and I've never even met him, but damn I know you still care about him. As pissed off as you are over what he did, you still care, God only knows why. I've introduced you to guys at the hospital who are perfect for you and you can't even get past a first date if you even go out with them at all. You always find something wrong with them. I can't help but think that it's because they're not him."

As Sharon spoke, Cuddy's face flushed and she looked down at her feet. "What is wrong with me?"

Sharon laughed. "Oh there's nothing wrong with you Lisa, when you find the one, even if it's an asshole like House, nobody else even compares. You obviously saw great qualities in him and I trust your judgment in that if you loved him, even for all his crap, he must have been a good guy. The question is now what?"

"Yeah, that sounds familiar." She chuckled lightly. "That's what House asked me our first night together-after I broke up with Lucas and I told him I loved him."

"Oh Lisa." Sharon put her hand on her friend's shoulder. "You told me you guys never had a chance to talk about what happened not just after the breakup but after what he did to your house. You told me yourself he has never been violent with you or ever tried to hurt you physically right?"

Cuddy nodded.

"What pisses you off the most when you think about him?"

Cuddy looked at her friend with a raised eyebrow. That was out of the blue. She had no idea how to answer that question. What pissed her off the most? Was it House running his car into her home? Running away like a coward? The hookers? The Vicodin? All the bullshit he caused her at work for so many years?

And then it hit her.

"It pisses me off that he just couldn't let me in and let me help him when he was in pain. He couldn't tell me what he was feeling. If he had just talked to me, things would have been different. If he had just opened up to me, trusted me, been okay with feeling pain. We didn't communicate like normal couples, I had to guess what he was thinking and when I tried to talk to him he'd deflect. It was like running in circles at ninety miles an hour trying to keep up with him."

"I see."

"What?"

"Well, I would have expected the first answer to be that the thing that pissed you off the most was that he ran his car into your home but that's not what you answered. Instead your answer was that he didn't communicate with you. That's interesting."

"Oh I'm still pissed about what he did."

"I know you are Lisa and you have every right to be."

"I'm a mess."

"No you're not, for crissakes, you're human, I'm human, we're all just human, we make mistakes, we screw up, it's what we do so well, better than any other species. Let me ask you this, do you think he intended to hurt you?"

Cuddy thought about that a moment before answering. She sighed, "No. At first, I was so angry at him I couldn't see straight and I wanted his ass in jail. I wanted to kill him myself. All I kept thinking is what if Rachel had been there? What if he'd hurt her, or me, or my sister? Or all of us? Or worse? How would this have affected Rachel psychologically seeing the father figure she'd grown to trust, do something like that? It never crossed my mind that he intended to hurt me, I was just so consumed with the fact he'd done it, it took a while for me to work towards thinking about why he might have done it. For all his crazy stunts and self-destructiveness, House had never put me or Rachel in danger and never gave me any reason to suspect he would. The idea of him doing it on purpose never crossed my mind because I've known him for half my life and there's just no way..." she left off there unsure of what to say next.

"People can be so hurt or filled with rage and out of their minds that they are capable of doing things they wouldn't do under normal circumstances. Something in him just snapped. You told me once he had a rough childhood, he doesn't make friends easily and he has a hard time communicating. It's entirely possible a lifetime of this just hit him all at once. I do hope for his sake he's getting help because what he did to you was a sign of serious emotional issues, especially given he's never been violent before. Now I'm going to ask you something else. Why did you fall in love with him?"

Cuddy got up from the bench and walked over to the huge tree next to it as she stared out at the girls who were playing in the sandbox.

"Lisa, you okay?"

"Yeah, just thinking."

"About?"

"The first time it was in college and God, he was amazing. He was a brilliant, rebellious, handsome, athletic …he played Lacrosse, he was so active and alive back then. He was a different person. I just loved his energy and he was so charming. Don't get me wrong, he was still an ass but he wasn't self-destructive. "

"What about after? When he showed up in Princeton?"

"He was with Stacy then and I was a little jealous, I mean, I guess that's when I realized that I still had feelings for him. But he was with her, then he had the infarction and everything changed. His personality became darker, he was angry, and hurt, especially after Stacy dumped him. He pushed everyone who cared about him away. I saw how broken he was and honestly I was afraid to get involved with that, it was pretty bad."

"Lisa, I know this hurts. Anytime you don't want to talk about it, you have to just say so okay? I won't be offended."

"I know. Besides Wilson, you're the only person I talk to about House, about my life and I'm okay with that. As to House, I've always loved him. There's something about him I couldn't put my finger on that specifically attracted me to him, it was just the way he was, all of him. Working together all those years, God it was so hard to keep myself from making a move on him. There was always something between us, and maybe we both knew what could happen if we acted on it. I guess that's why we were so scared. We shared many years of memories and if getting together didn't work, we risked losing all of that. Honestly, before I could never imagine my life without him in it but at the same time I knew that being with him could be a disaster for both of us."

Sharon smiled and looked over at the monkey bars where the two girls were getting ready to climb up. "Maybe we better go keep an eye on them, those things can be dangerous."

As they headed over to the monkey bars, Rachel had made it to the top and was already swinging upside down. Her shirt fell over her face as she yelled, "Look mommy!"

Cuddy laughed and watched her daughter. "Rachel, did House really teach you to hang upside down like that?"

"Yes mommy."

"When?"

"He would take me to the park when you worked late. He said it was our secret and I couldn't tell anyone."

Cuddy looked at Sharon. "Why would he want to keep it a secret?"

Sharon just shrugged. As an afterthought she suggested "Maybe he just wanted something that was theirs to share?"

Cuddy looked back up at Rachel, "Rach, did you have fun at the park with House?"

"Oh we had lots of fun and then we would get ice cream. He said that was a secret too."

Cuddy did not seem surprised. After all, House was much like a kid himself so naturally he'd take her to the ice cream parlor, even when she told him Rachel shouldn't have sweets before dinner.

"Mommy?"

"Yes baby."

"Is House going to be mad at me that I told you?"

Cuddy's smile faded. "No honey he won't be mad."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

"Okay. I don't want him to be mad at me." Rachel said nonchalantly as she kept swinging and playing with Hannah. Cuddy was amazed that even with the time and distance, Rachel hadn't forgotten House.

Sharon leaned on the monkey bars looking at Cuddy. "House really made an impact on Rachel didn't he?"

"That he did." Cuddy said almost to herself as she seemed deep in thought.

"Lisa I know when you're thinking. Come on, out with it."

"God Sharon you're off-duty now you don't have to be a psychologist now!"

"I know, but I like getting into your head. You never know what kind of dirt I can get on you!"

The two women laughed and then Cuddy continued. "I'm just thinking about how much interaction House had with Rachel that I didn't know about. I bitched at him for a lot of shit, not putting the toilet seat down, using my toothbrush, not taking out the trash, just stupid stuff. Well it wasn't stupid back then but now it seems trivial ya know? One of the reasons I didn't get involved with him when I adopted Rachel was because I knew he couldn't be there for her, for us and only afterwards after he...I find out he spent a lot of time with her I didn't even know about. I was wrong about him, he really was trying."

Sharon nodded her head in acknowledgement.

Cuddy continued, "In his letter, he told me that the day he came to my house, the day it happened, he'd intended to give me my hairbrush and looked through the window and saw me in there with Jerry, the guy I told you about that my sister tried to set me up with. Jerry was a nice guy but not my type, but he was nice and so I invited him over to have lunch with my sister, her husband and me. There was nothing going on, but House didn't know that. He said that when he saw Jerry in there, with me, he felt like someone had punched him in the gut. Sharon, he'd asked me earlier that day if I was seeing anyone and I told him no. It was the truth. Seeing me in there, smiling, he felt like I had moved on and he could not. I think that plus everything else that had happened just sent him over the edge."

"My God Lisa, what a mess."

"Sharon, you have no idea."

Both women were silent for a few moments as they listened to the girls' laughter and watched them play.

"Sharon?"

"Yeah Lisa."

"I need to tell you something."

"What hon?"

"I lied to him. I told him I didn't want him to change. I mean, I didn't but I did. I wanted him to stay the same crazy, charming pain in the ass that I always loved but I just wanted him to learn how to talk to me and trust me and not be so pessimistic about everything. I had hoped he would want to change himself."

"Nothing wrong with wanting that."

"When I broke up with him, it wasn't over the Vicodin. I thought I was dying and he wasn't there with me. Afterwards when I knew I was going to be okay and realized he'd taken the Vicodin, what hurt the most wasn't the pills but that he needed them just to be there for me. I needed to be able to count on him to be there for me. I needed him to be my support system, to be there for both me and Rachel when I couldn't handle things alone. Anytime we had an argument or we had difficulties, he just tried to deflect or avoid, or act like it was nothing. He never dealt with the issues head-on."

"Did you ever tell him that?"

"No. After the breakup, he spiraled out of control, taking Vicodin, locking himself in a hotel room and engaging in God knows how much raucous sex with hookers. Wilson wanted me to talk to him but it was pretty hard to do that considering I was his problem. Wilson found him and tried to talk sense into him but it didn't work. He just wouldn't listen. It was like he tuned all rationality out completely. He'd changed and seemed like a different man. His behavior was off, I knew he was back on Vicodin and lots of it from what Wilson told me, but there was something else, it was like he didn't care anymore, about himself, about me, or even Wilson. He refused to talk with Wilson about what happened with us, he put up this wall that was ten feet thick and wouldn't let anyone in. Wilson suggested he see his psychiatrist and House threw him out of his apartment."

"Wow. From everything you've told me, he may have been scared that dealing with it would send him over the edge. But in fact, not dealing with it is what sent him over the edge in the end. Change is hard and it's made worse when a person has a lifetime of pain and misery to deal with. A person can't move forward without dealing with the unresolved issues that affect their behavior. I don't think there's any way your relationship with House would have survived in the long run without him addressing his issues and maybe without you addressing yours too."

"Yeah. He was a mess. I was a mess. He did some horrible things. I ignored him. We never talked about it. I wanted us to have it out, yell, scream, and cry, whatever. He held it in; he never talked to me about it. He nearly died after that damn surgery I told you about, he could have bled to death in his own bathtub and that would have been it. He has no idea to this day how, when I took Rachel home after his surgery, how I cried for hours thinking I almost lost him again. Finally we talked, at lunch, the day everything fell apart and he...I begged him to talk to me. He…he pushed me up against the wall and just looked at me, so hurt, and he just blurted out, "You want to know how I feel? I feel hurt." I have never seen him more hurt or vulnerable ever than at that moment. I just wanted to just hold him and cry with him. I told him I was sorry but that look in his eyes made me realize it was too late. You know what he said to me?"

Cuddy took a moment to take a deep breath and gather her thoughts; the conversation had taken its toll on her.

"What did he say Lisa?"

"He told me it wasn't my fault. I nearly lost it. After all that had happened, he was letting me know that I wasn't responsible for anything that happened. At that point I figured he was telling me I could move on, that maybe he could move on too." Tears were forming in her eyes as she spoke.

"Oh hon, are you okay?"

"Yeah" she wiped her eyes. "I didn't expect we'd be discussing this. I'm not upset for talking about it, I just don't want Rachel to see me like this." She looked over at the girls who were climbing off the playground equipment. Sharon gave her a quick hug and Cuddy returned it and said, "God Sharon I love you and you 're a good friend but thank God you're not my psychologist, you could retire on the money you'd make from treating me!" Both women laughed through their tears as the girls bounded towards them.

"Mommy, did you see me hang upside down? Did you?"

Cuddy looked at Rachel, staring down into those eyes full of wonder and innocence. So many nights she lay awake praying that when Rachel grew up, she would never have to deal with the kind of pain that comes with loving someone as much as she loved House. She knew that she could never protect Rachel from the pain and hurt that accompanies life and love, but she hoped she could at least teach her daughter to be strong enough to deal with it when it happened. As she hugged her little girl, she smiled and replied, "Yes baby, I saw you."