it clear their marriage will take time to repair. Laurel tracks Sally down to a block of flats. She finds a shrine of Ashley inside and Sally claims to be pregnant with his child. Laurel attacks Sally and dangles her over the flat balcony. Laurel sees sense and pulls her back over, which results in Sally being arrested. Laurel refuses to go on strike over Nikhil Sharma (Rik Makarem) while all the other factory girls do. She is later annoyed to find out Charity Tate (Emma Atkins) set Nikhil up. Laurel becomes annoyed with the atmosphere between Ashley and Sandy. She spends more time out the house and with Marlon. They share an emotional moment, though when Marlon becomes close to Rachel Breckle (Gemma Oaten), Laurel becomes jealous and realises she has feelings for Marlon. Laurel later divorces Ashley and begins a relationship with Marlon, who proposes to her in 2013. When out in town with Rhona Goskirk (Zoe Henry), who is busy looking for painkillers to feed her addiction, Laurel is violently carjacked by Ross Barton (Michael Parr), which leads to Laurel becoming very paranoid and too frightened to leave the house. She becomes obsessed with trying to find her attacker, and when she does, she threatens him with a pair of scissors. Ross attacks her in self-defence, but Marlon arrives before any real damage is done. She is mortified when Ross moves to the village and is revealed to be a relative of Moira Barton's (Natalie J. Robb). She attempts to frame him in order to send him to jail, but Moira calls the police and Laurel is arrested but released without charge. Laurel later feels uncomfortable in early 2014 when Marlon's ex-wife Donna Windsor (Verity Rushworth) returns to the village with his secret four-year-old daughter April (Amelia Flanagan). She is later very sympathetic towards Donna when she discovers that she is dying from terminal mesothelioma, and agrees to act as a mother figure to April after Donna dies. Laurel is concerned by how worried Marlon is by Donna's shocking illness, which leads to many arguments and Laurel moving in with Rhona and Paddy Kirk (Dominic Brunt), but they later reconcile. Donna eventually commits suicide by throwing herself from a multi-storey car park when doing illegal dealings with Ross, and Laurel later discovers that Marlon kissed Donna before she died. Laurel also admits that she drunkenly kissed Ashley