She'd been noticeably subdued throughout the whole case, ever since the nut claimed to be cursed. She stopped talking endlessly on their car rides together and started staring out the window and listening to country music, even though he told her not to.

It could only mean one thing, Lassiter knew. They'd been partners for nearly four years, and in those for years he had gotten to know her better than he had ever gotten to know anyone else. She was thinking about something, something she needed to talk about with someone. Something she couldn't keep to herself.

And, while they were driving together one day, it came.

"Carlton?" Juliet suddenly turned away from the window and fixed her eyes on him.

"Yeah?" he glanced at her nonchalantly.

"Do you believe in love curses?"

The question had taken him so off guard that his foot slipped off the pedal for a second. When he'd situated his foot so that the car wouldn't go spinning out of control and they wouldn't hit a tree and meet an untimely demise, he looked at her again.

"Pardon?"

"Love curses, Carlton." Her voice was impatient.

"What about them?"

"Do you think they're real?"

She wasn't going to let this one go. She wanted an answer, and when Juliet wanted an answer she wasn't one to give up easily.

He considered the question briefly. "I've never really given the matter much thought. Why?"

"No reason." He could see her face growing pinker out of the corner of his eye. "I was just thinking..." She looked away in embarrassment.

After a minute, she spoke again. "I asked Shawn," she said bluntly.

"Oh?" He bristled at the sound of that name. "What'd our resident psychic have to say on the subject?"

"Nothing much, really. Nothing satisfactory, anyway." She looked away again.

There was a short silence, and before he knew what he was doing, he started talking. "Well, I loved Victoria, but our marriage went downhill pretty quickly. Then there was Lucinda, and you know that relationship was disastrous..." he paused. "You know, O'Hara, you might be onto something."

"How so?" She turned her intense blue eyes on him again.

"I've never been able to do anything successful with a relationship and I know I'm not the only one like that in this world." He paused thoughtfully. "On the other hand, you hear about people who meet when they're six years old and stay best friends until college, when the boy proposes to the girl and they get married on a perfect spring day and live in a brick house with a white picket fence, 2.5 children, and 2.28 cars." She giggled at this. "You know, cute little love stories that sound like they come out of one of Taylor Swift's stupid songs. It causes the rest of us- the people who don't get Taylor Swift lives -to wonder a bit. I mean, why do some people get happy, successful relationships on the first try when some of us never do? What did the boy and girl who met when they were six years old do that made them better than the rest of us? Maybe there are forces working against us."

"That's what I think sometimes," she said softly, watching him closely. "Maybe there is someone- or something -out there that's trying to stop us from being happy."

"All we can do is fight it, O'Hara," he said wisely. "Fight with all we've got and try to stop them. After all, we deserve happily ever afters just as much as the next guy. We've just gotta work harder to get them."

"But we're fighters," she said with more energy in her voice. "We can beat it."

"And we will," he said, turning to look at her again. She was smiling in awe in wonderment, with the perfect smile that made her blue eyes even more beautiful. "We're gonna beat it."

As they came to a red light, his hand slipped off the steering wheel and found hers. She squeezed his fingers as the light turned green and he continued to drive one-handed.

"Life's full of fights," he said finally. "We're gonna beat them together."

"Yeah, well, we've gotta start sometime." She beamed at him. "You open for dinner tomorrow night?"