Previously…
– After the former Moriani home exploded, Brent found Rosie and Gabrielle locked in the basement and freed them. Moments later, Brent collapsed from smoke inhalation.
– Travis was relieved when Rosie and Gabrielle emerged from the blaze. An unconscious Brent was brought out moments later.
– Natalie began to tell Spencer the truth about Loretta and the explosion, only to be shocked to see her mother-in-law at home, safe and sound.

The urgent wail of sirens cuts through the night as the ambulance speeds through King’s Bay, headed for the hospital. In the back of the emergency vehicle, Travis Fisher holds his wife’s hand as the two cradle their young daughter between them. An EMT stands by, having just finished checking both Rosie and Gabrielle.

“I can’t believe we’re out of there,” Rosie says in a daze. “I spent days looking for a way out, but it was airtight.”

“All that matters is that you’re both safe,” Travis tells her. Gabrielle lets out a hacking cough, and both adults look at her with alarm, but just as quickly as she made the noise, she slumps back against Travis and sticks her thumb in her mouth.

“I’m not sure she even understands what happened,” Rosie says. 

“Good.” Travis rubs the little girl’s dark hair. “So was Loretta bringing you food and water? Is that why she was in there?”

Rosie’s face screws up with confusion. “Loretta Ragan? No. There was a man — he was always in a mask when he came in to see us, but he was passed out in the basement when Brent got us out and didn’t have the mask on.”

“Do you think you could I.D. him?” Travis asks.

“I might not have to. Brent seemed to know who he was. I had no idea, though.”

The ambulance whips through a left-hand turn, jarring all of them slightly. 

“I knew you didn’t run,” Travis says. “They all thought you did—“

“Who?” Rosie asks sharply.

“My aunt and uncle. The police, sort of. Because you went missing right before—“ He stops himself cold. 

“Right before what?” And then Rosie’s brown eyes go wide with realization. Her lashes flicker nervously. “The DNA test. You got the results?”

Travis sucks in a breath, but he knows that he cannot lie to her. Especially not now.

“Oh my god.” Instinctively Rosie pulls Gabrielle toward her. “It’s true? She’s…”

All Travis can do is nod, confirming that the girl they are in the process of adopting, the girl who is for all intents and purposes their daughter, is the same child that Molly and Brent were told they lost at birth two years ago.

---

“What are you talking about, Natalie?”

In the foyer of their home, Spencer Ragan stares down his wife, while his mother preens at Natalie from the staircase. 

“She— she shouldn’t even be standing here,” Natalie sputters. “I watched her get into a car, and it went to this house, and the house exploded—”

Spencer swivels his head to look at Loretta. “What house? What happened?”

“I don’t know what your fool of a wife is babbling about,” Loretta says with a shrug of her shoulders, covered in a green silk blouse. “She must be making up stories.”

“I’m not making up stories!” Natalie shrieks.

Loretta folds her arms. “I can’t imagine why you would have followed me to a charity luncheon, Natalie, let alone be making up all sorts of bizarre tall tales. Is this some strange attempt to get me out of your house? To turn my son against me? Because I cannot fathom why you would ever think you needed to follow me.”

The older woman glowers at her daughter-in-law, her intense green eyes narrowing as she does so. And Natalie can interpret the silent message all too clearly: If you push this issue, you’re going to have to explain that phone call I had you make, which means you’ll have to tell Spencer that you’re the one who hired Sonja Kahele…

“Ugh!” Natalie groans. She throws up her hands and storms out toward the kitchen.

Baffled, Spencer looks back at Loretta. “What the hell was that?”

“I can’t pretend to understand a thing that woman says or does,” Loretta replies with another shrug.

---

Christian Taylor hears the music before he even reaches the door to his own dorm room. Drake and 21 Savage’s “Jimmy Cooks” spills out into the hallway, competing with the sounds of a rowdy group of guys playing video games somewhere else on the floor. As soon as he turns the knob to enter his own room, the music grows louder.

“Are you sure you can hear that? It’s so quiet,” he shouts sarcastically over the thumping song, only to stop in his tracks when he sees his twin brother sitting on the bed with Jasmine Knight.

“Hi, Christian,” the raven-haired girl says with a smirk.

“Oh. Hi.” Christian gives her as much of a smile as he can muster, then looks at Caleb. “Can you turn that down a little?”

“Sure. Jesus. I thought you were gonna be out for a while.”

Caleb uses his phone to turn down the volume of the Bluetooth speaker. Christian eyes the pair warily, wondering exactly what he would have walked in on if he’d arrived a few minutes later. Not that he should be surprised — despite not even being a student at King’s Bay University, Jasmine has been around a lot lately. Christian had thought, or maybe hoped, that his brother would find someone new to date once they began college, but that hasn’t been the case so far.

“Want some?” Jasmine asks as she holds up a bottle of cheap sparkling wine. “Caleb had one of the juniors on the soccer team do a run for us.” 

“For champagne?” Christian replies.

“There’s beer in the fridge,” Caleb explains, “but we’re celebrating.”

Christian lifts one eyebrow. “Celebrating… what?”

“I got a job!” Jasmine announces, and she pours some of the wine into a red Solo cup that she pulls from a short stack on the desk. The foamy bubbles come dangerously close to spilling over the edge of the cup, and Christian is about to grab a nearby towel when the beverage recedes from the brink as quickly as it got there.

“Oh. Wow,” he says. “Congratulations. What’s the job?”

“Kind of ironic,” Jasmine says as she passes Christian the cup. She pauses, as if waiting for him to pull a guess out of thin air with zero hints whatsoever. “You’re looking at the newest clerk at the Objection boutique downtown.”

Hand gripped around the red cup, Christian nearly does a double-take. “What? Really? Did Mom…?”

“I don’t think Mom would’ve pulled those strings even if she were working at Objection right now,” Caleb says with a laugh. “Nah, Jasmine got this all on her own.”

“I guess they had hired some girl from Kentucky, but she moved home abruptly, so they needed someone badly with the holidays coming up,” Jasmine says. 

“Well, congrats,” Christian says, raising the cup. He is about to take what he expects to be an unpleasant sip of the beverage when he feels his phone vibrate in his pocket — and hears Caleb’s chime at the same time. Understanding the potential seriousness of this, they both reach for their phones.

“Is it your parents?” Jasmine asks as the boys check their phones. “Did they find the— your sister?”

“My mom says we should go meet her at the hospital,” Caleb tells her. He quickly types out a response. “That doesn’t sound good.”

Christian watches his phone intently as Caleb’s message appears in the group thread, followed almost immediately by another text from their mother:

I’m with your dad. Please, just come as soon as you can.

The twins look at one another with alarm.

“I can drive,” Christian says, grateful that he never got as far as taking that sip. He roughly sets down the cup on his nightstand and pulls out his car keys.

---

“What’s going on?” Molly asks with desperation as she sees Travis and Tim re-enter the waiting area outside the emergency unit of King’s Bay Memorial Hospital.

“Rosie and Gabrielle are being looked at by a doctor now,” Travis says. “They seemed okay in the ambulance. Rosie thinks the room they were in shielded them from most of the fire.”

Molly touches a hand to her chest in relief. “That’s great.”

Carefully, Travis asks, “Is Uncle Brent…?”

“He’s being examined now. He wasn’t conscious in the ambulance,” she says, shaking her head. “I just wanted him to wake up…”

Tim places a comforting hand on his sister’s shoulder. “They got him out of there really quickly. And he’s in good hands now.”

“I know. I know,” Molly says, sounding like she is trying very hard to convince herself that this is true. “But he breathed in a lot of smoke, they think.” After a somber, quiet beat, she refocuses on Travis. “Gabrielle really seems okay?”

He nods, even though the mere act pains him; it feels as if he is somehow passing the baton of worrying about the girl to her biological parent.

“I think she’ll be fine,” he finally responds. Molly lets out a loud sigh and hangs her head. 

“Oh, good. You’re all here,” a voice says, and the three look to see Claire Fisher, in her blue scrubs, hurrying in as a set of swinging doors flap in her wake. 

“Do you have any more info?” Tim asks, hurrying toward his ex-wife. “Was Loretta in that house?”

“I don’t know,” Claire tells them. “But there were three other men inside. They’re all on ventilators right now. Two of them were police officers — the ones who must’ve tailed that car to the house.”

“Those were the two guys we saw being brought out before Rosie and Gabrielle,” Travis says to Molly. 

“And what about the third?” Tim interjects. “Who else was in that house?”

“That’s where this gets even weirder, if that’s possible,” Claire says, batting her eyes in disbelief. “The other man was Eric Westin.”

“What?!” Molly and Tim exclaim in near-unison.

“Why does that name sound familiar?” Travis asks.

“He’s a lawyer,” Tim says. “Or was. He was the one who planned to have Sophie kidnapped so Helen would win custody from Jason—“

“—and he represented Diane when she sued me for custody of Samantha,” Claire adds. 

“I also dated him about a million years ago. It wasn’t serious at all,” Molly says. Then an expression of horror spreads over her face. “Do you think that’s what this was about? Revenge on me for dumping him?”

Tim scowls. “No offense, but that whole thing seemed like a blip on the radar even at the time. There has to be more going on here.”

Jaw agape, Travis looks from one relative to another in bewilderment. 

“But what the hell could that be?” he questions.

---

While Spencer goes upstairs to check on Peter, Loretta stalks into the kitchen, where she finds Natalie pouring an overly generous amount of white wine into a glass.

“I’m not sure that’s the ticket to clearing your head,” Loretta says.

Natalie lets out a huff as she shoves the bottle of wine back into the SubZero fridge and roughly closes the door. “I hate you. Do you know that?”

“That’s no way to speak to your mother-in-law.”

After checking quickly to be sure that no one else is within earshot, Natalie hisses, “You are a monster. Having that baby and Rosie kidnapped — blowing up that house—“

“I’m afraid I can’t take credit for that,” Loretta says. “One of those buffoons with their guns must have been responsible.”

“And what? You hopped on your broomstick and flew out of there in the nick of time?”

“I’ve learned not to linger around a place once I hear police officers breaking down the door. Very little can come of that.”

“So you admit it! You were in that house!” Natalie takes a victorious gulp of wine. 

“I don’t have to admit anything, Natalie. And if you have any sense, you’ll stop peddling this idea that I was somehow involved in what happened tonight—“

“You were!”

“And that will stay between you and me,” Loretta says with a sneer. “Otherwise—“

“—everyone will find out I hired Sonja, blah blah.” Natalie sighs. “But you won’t get away with this forever, Loretta.”

“We’ll see about that. Goodnight, Natalie.”

Frustrated, Natalie takes another hearty swig of her wine. Once she is alone, she mutters, “You won’t get away with this forever, you miserable bat. Someone who was inside that house is going to rat you out.”

---

Molly gasps to herself when she steps into the hospital room, which is silent save for the occasional beep from a machine. Brent lies in the bed, arms by his side and eyes closed, with an oxygen mask fixed over his face. She gently closes the door behind herself, not wanting any outside disturbances to creep in.

“Oh, Brent,” she says softly. It takes her another moment to push past her shock at seeing him in this state and approach the bed. As she does, she sees the way that the sheet is riding up ever so slightly, revealing the bottom of his prosthetic leg. It makes her think immediately of the explosion they were in all those years ago, when Nick Moriani detonated a bomb at Claire and Ryan’s wedding, resulting in a number of casualties — her mentor, Camille, as well as Sarah and Matt’s unborn child among them — and the loss of Brent’s lower leg.

“You got better after that,” Molly tells him, “and you’ll get better now. I know you will.”

She places her hand over his, hoping against hope that it will move or twitch, that he will somehow respond to the touch. But he doesn’t.

“You’re the bravest man I know, Brent Taylor,” she says. “And you saved our daughter tonight. Gabrielle is going to be okay.”

She squeezes his hand.

”Please wake up. Come back to me. We’ve wasted too much time not being together. The minute you open those eyes, we are not wasting another second.”

At the sound of the door opening again, Molly jumps, but she glances over her shoulder and is heartened to see their sons entering the room.

“How is he?” Christian asks immediately, rushing toward his mother. Caleb follows a few, more cautious steps behind.

Molly pulls Christian into a hug. “He inhaled a lot of smoke. They have him on oxygen. He hasn’t woken up yet.”

“Dad, you’ve got this,” Caleb says, lingering uncertainly at the side of Brent’s bed. “You’re gonna get better and wake up.”

“He will,” Molly says, and she slides over to give Caleb a hug, as well. “Gabrielle is going to be okay, too. Everything is going to work out.”

“What about Travis and Rosie?” Christian asks.

Molly pushes a smile across her lips. “Rosie’s okay, too. And Travis is fine.”

“I mean…” Christian trails off, twisting his fingers together. “With Gabrielle.”

“It’s all going to work out,” Molly says. “One way or another. The five of us — we’re going to be together. As a family.”

Before the twins can react, the door opens again. They all look over to see Claire entering in her scrubs. She has a tight, concerned expression on her face, and immediately Molly thinks the worst.

“What?” she asks. “Did you run tests?”

“We know as much about Brent as you do right now,” Claire says somberly. “But I have news I thought you’d be interested in — news that might affect getting answers about what happened.”

Molly inhales sharply. “What?”

“It’s Eric Westin,” Claire tells them. “He just died.”

END OF EPISODE 1156

What will Eric’s passing mean for the case against Loretta?
Will Brent survive to reunite with Molly at long last?
How will Rosie react to the news about Gabrielle’s DNA test?
Discuss all this and more in the comments below!

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