Previously…
– Jaq disclosed to Sarah and Diane that Zane planned on taking Tori to Mount Hood, Oregon, to elope.
– At the chapel, Tori managed to slip the minister a note asking for help.
– When Zane received an alert on his phone about Tori’s abduction, he pulled a knife and forced her to return to the car.

“Please. Send someone as fast as you can,” Reverend Heard says with urgency before hanging up the landline. 

He looks down at the scratched wooden desk. On top of it sits a heavily creased strip of toilet paper, a rudimentary message scrawled on it in lipstick:

911 HELP

The minister got a strange sense the moment that young woman pushed her way ahead of her fiancé to shake his hand, and some instinct told him not to react when he felt her pressing the folded-up paper into his palm. As soon as he made it to the back office, he unfurled the flimsy paper and found, despite a few rips in it, a message that told him everything he needed to know.

Reverend Heard has faced enough situations of domestic abuse in his time as a church leader, but rarely do they seem as dire as this. He wonders if that woman is a victim of sex trafficking or something equally terrifying.

He takes a deep breath and recalls the 911 operator’s instructions:

“Keep them there as long as you can. We’re sending someone now.”

His hands still shaking, the minister leaves the note on the desk, grabs a clipboard, and heads back out to the vestibule. 

“We just have to fill out some paperwork,” he calls out, but he stops in his tracks when he reaches the vestibule.

It’s empty.

“Ms. Gray? Mr. Tanaka?” he shouts, as he checks the restroom and the inner sanctum of the church itself. But there is no sign of the couple.

He rushes to the door and sees that their car is gone, as well.

—–

“Dammit!” Zane Tanaka blurts out as he slams one hand onto the steering wheel. His other hand holds a sharp knife, pointing it in the general direction of Tori, who is strapped into the passenger seat. Her panicked eyes watch the knife carefully; with every abrupt turn Zane makes and every speed bump the car takes, the blade bounces around in the air, and Tori tries to shrink against the passenger-side door to avoid it.

“What are you doing?” she cries desperately. 

“We were so close to being married,” he mutters. She can’t even tell if he intends to be talking to her or if he is just voicing stray thoughts aloud. “They had to go and ruin it.”

“Who ruined it?” Tori asks. “What happened?”

One moment, they were waiting in the church’s vestibule, with Tori counting the seconds until Reverend Heard would return — having called the police, with any luck. Instead, some sort of noisy alert on Zane’s phone prompted him to pull a knife and use it to force Tori back into the car.

“Your bitch mother did this,” he says. “I know it was her.”

“Did what?”

His head snaps toward her, and there is something wild about his expression, as if he is only now just noticing that she is there — despite having held a knife on her for the last several minutes of frantic driving. 

“The fucking Amber Alert, or whatever it is.” His voice brims with fury. “For her to put out word that I kidnapped you…”

Tori bites back the retort that is on the tip of her tongue, considering that he is holding a knife mere inches from her. She looks out the window again, but given the rocky roadside and the speed at which he is driving, she doesn’t think she could safely jump from the car. Nor is she confident that she could outrun Zane if he stopped immediately afterward and pursued her on foot.

He steps on the gas to cruise through a yellow light as it turns red. It is a big, open rural area, with visibility in all directions, but all Tori can think about is the car crash she and Marcus got in — the crash that caused her baby’s death.

“Be careful!” she shrieks.

“I’m fine. I got this,” he says.

She covers her face. “Please. Just be careful.”

“Just trust me. I’ve got this under control.”

“Where are we going?” she asks, unable to keep her terror out of her voice now.

“I don’t know.”

“Our stuff is at the cabin–“

“We can’t go back there.”

“Zane, what are we running from?” She watches him intently, but he grips the steering wheel harder with his left hand and again accelerates the vehicle. “I could get them to call off that alert. If you let me call them–“

“We’re not calling them,” he says.

“Why not?” When he doesn’t respond immediately, she recognizes her opening. “Let me call my Uncle Brent and tell him this is all a mistake. We can go home, and no one will get in any trouble.”

She continues to observe him and sees him doing the mental calculations. Every second that he doesn’t speak feels like a victory.

“Here,” she says. “I’ll call, and then we can turn around–” But as soon as she reaches across the seat to take the phone from his lap, he waves the knife in her direction.

She screams, and Zane abruptly jerks the car into the opposite lane. Thankfully, there is no vehicle coming at them, but the sheer chaos of it causes Tori’s heart to race.

“Why are you doing this?” she pleads. “You love me. Why are you trying to hurt me?”

“I don’t want to hurt you–“

“You’re waving a knife at me and driving like a maniac!” Suddenly tears start to fall from her eyes, the result of a full day of horror and trauma at his hands. “Just let me out of the car! Please let me out!”

“No!” he barks. “You need to trust me.”

“Trust you?! You have a knife, and  you’re yelling, and when you grabbed me to get that tracker, I thought you were going to–“

“What did you say?”

His face is full of rage as it turns back to her, and only now does Tori realize her mistake.

“What? Nothing,” she says breathlessly. “Please. Just watch the road.”

“The tracker,” he says, glancing only briefly back at the road. “So you do remember everything.”

“Thank god you’re okay,” Diane Bishop exclaims as she throws her arms around her daughter.

“Of course I’m okay, Mom,” Samantha replies as she accepts Diane’s overly intense embrace. The women stand in the marble-filled lobby of Objection Designs, where Samantha has come out to meet her mother after Diane informed her that she was coming to talk to her. The receptionist who has replaced Finn — a rail-thin blonde whose name sounds like Brittany but has a number of unnecessary additional letters, as Samantha noted from her e-mail signature — sits behind the desk, answering one phone call after another. 

“Well, good.” Diane takes a step back, but her hands remain on Sam’s shoulders. “Not to get all sappy, but seeing how freaked-out Sarah is over Tori got my mind racing.”

“I promise: I’m fine.” Samantha smiles to emphasize the point, although even that gesture feels forced in light of what is going on with her cousin. “Has Aunt Sarah had any updates? Everyone around the office was getting that alert about Tori being kidnapped.”

“I hope she has. But she was busy making a thousand phone calls and then took off to meet up with Matt.”

Samantha throws back her head. “I hope we hear soon that Tori is safe. This is so awful.”

“I know,” Diane agrees. She hesitates before adding, “There’s a part of this that I thought you should hear from me first.”

“Oh no. What did you do?”

“Me? Nothing! I swear.”

“Okay…”

“The reason we know where Tori is,” Diane says, “is because Jaq told us.”

“What?!” Samantha’s head juts forward. “I knew they were friends with Zane, but — are they helping him? How did you get them to tell you?”

“They actually volunteered the info. Which is great! This could be the lead that Sarah and Matt and the cops need to save Tori.”

“But that means Zane told them what was going on.”

“From the sounds of it, Zane confided in Jaq about his plans for eloping with Tori,” Diane explains, “before whatever went sideways went sideways. Jaq heard Sarah and me talking and decided to pipe up.”

“Well, it’s good they decided to do the decent thing instead of protecting Zane.” Samantha nods as she processes this information. “I knew, deep down, they weren’t an evil person.”

“That’s what I was worried about.”

“What?”

“That you’d see Jaq as some kind of hero for doing this,” Diane says. “It’s what I love about you, 99 percent of the time — you want to see the best in people. Hell, you’ve done it for me more than I deserve. But Jaq knows exactly what they’re doing here.”

“You think they only told so I’d forgive them for framing Tempest?”

“It’s like I always say: don’t hustle a hustler. It’s great that Jaq came forward. But don’t you think about trusting them again.”

“Okay,” Samantha says, her head still spinning from the day’s events. “I’ll… I’ll be aware. What really matters now is that Tori is found safely.”

“I won’t argue with you there,” Diane says. “I’m crossing my fingers that Sarah gets good news before she even makes it to Mount Hood.”

—–

“No! Are you kidding me?”

Sarah Fisher Gray slams her fists against the dashboard when she sees the sea of red brake lights up ahead. 

“Check Waze,” Matt Gray says from the driver’s seat, where he lets out a colossal sigh while bringing the SUV to a stop. The couple is nearly an hour outside King’s Bay, on their way to Mount Hood, Oregon.

“We need to be there, like, fifteen minutes ago,” Sarah mutters as she fumbles to open the traffic-tracking app on her phone. 

Matt surveys the stopped traffic up ahead quietly.

“There’s an accident about a mile ahead,” Sarah reports. “Then it opens up again.”

“That’s not too bad.”

“It’s wasting valuable time.” She shakes her phone, as if that might magically change what it has to say. 

“The cops out there are already looking for her,” Matt says.

“I don’t have a ton of faith in the cops out there,” Sarah retorts. “I’m not sure they’re that versed in hostage situations.”

After a long beat of silence, Matt says, “I’m really worried about Tori.”

“Me, too.” Sarah reaches across and squeezes his legs through his jeans. “We’re gonna save her. We’re gonna get through this traffic jam and make it out there and save her–“

She is interrupted by the insistent vibrating of an incoming call. Her fingers fly to answer it as soon as they see Brent‘s name on the display.

“Brent! What’s going on?” she says frantically. 

Matt’s gaze shifts sideways to watch his wife as she listens to whatever Brent is saying on the other end of the call.

“They have a lead,” Sarah tells Matt excitedly. “A minister in Mount Hood talked to them.”

“Okay, that’s something,” Matt says, his leg bouncing up and down anxiously as he stares at the brake lights, willing them to disappear.

—–

Tori feels a horrible heaviness settle over herself as she processes what she has just done. 

“I– No–” She flounders for any words that could possibly undo this. “I don’t know anything about a tracker.”

“Stop lying to me!” Zane yells, swishing the knife in her direction dramatically. She presses her body against the passenger door again. 

“I’m not lying!” she says. “I’m scared, Zane! You scaring me!”

Watching him carefully, she sees his Adam’s apple bounce as he swallows. The knife still seems perilously close to her body.

“I thought you loved me,” she says, her voice coming out like a whimper.

“Of course I love you. But I’m starting to think you don’t love me.”

“I– I’m scared. And confused.” She grips the handle above the door as he makes a sudden, wild right turn. “I want to go home, Zane. Take me home.”

“Home? You think we can go home now?” 

“I can still tell them–“

“I don’t trust you!” The knife swipes through the air again. “Okay. I don’t trust you, Tori. And that’s your fault.”

“Zane, please–“

“I’m sorry. You did this to yourself,” he says, hitting the gas even harder. 

Tori’s eyes go to the fuel gauge, hoping that perhaps Zane will have no choice but to stop soon. But the needle is right around the three-quarter-full mark.

He can drive for hours before he’ll have to stop, she realizes with horror. 

On the side of the road, a sign passes by in a flash:

LEAVING MOUNT HOOD

—–

With her canvas work tote slung over her shoulder, Samantha returns to the Objection lobby.

“Trevor said he’s leaving soon, anyway,” she tells Diane, who has been waiting. “He doesn’t think we’re going to get any work done.”

“Yeah, there’s no way,” Diane says. “Let’s go get something to eat — and maybe a drink or two.”

Brittney or Brittaneigh or however she spells her name waves at them, but before they can exit, someone comes running toward the entrance from the elevators.

“Landon?” Samantha says with confusion. “What are you doing here?”

“I just texted and you said you were at work–“

“I didn’t realize you were coming here.”

“I was downtown, anyway.” Landon’s eyes flicker over toward Diane. “Hi, Ms. Bishop.”

“Hi, Landon,” Diane replies. “What are you doing here?”

“I just clocked out, and I thought you might want to come with,” he says.

“Come with you where?” Samantha asks.

“Out to Mount Hood. I got the alert about Tori — I wanna go out there and try to find her–“

“That sounds dangerous,” Sam says.

“Yeah, it’s probably a terrible idea,” Diane says. “Let’s go.”

“Really?” Landon asks.

Samantha adjusts her glasses. “Mom, are you sure?”

“Your aunt is already on her way,” Diane says. “Maybe we help somehow.”

“You really want to do this?” Samantha asks. “Even after what happened between you and Tori?”

Diane leans in closer. “What happened?”

“The only reason we even got into a fight is because I wanted to keep her safe from Zane,” Landon says. “So if I can help do that now — I have to. Come on. I’ll drive.”

The three of them hurry toward the elevator.

END OF EPISODE 1128

Will Landon, Sarah, and the rest be able to rescue Tori?
What do you expect Zane to do next?
Discuss all the action in the comments below!

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