Previously…
– Having heard about the witness identifying Elly as the person who was at the scene of Loretta’s murder, Spencer went to confront her, only to discover Travis at The Wild Lady and chew him out in front of Rosie.
– Travis insisted that the only secret he and Elly are keeping is the fact that they agreed to bury the hatchet while Rosie was out of town.
– Tori took Lucy on for a night out with her cousins, but Lucy’s estranged boyfriend, Bryce, followed her and demanded to talk with her. He was thrown out of the bar but lingered in his truck, watching the entrance.

“You didn’t have to do this,” Tori Gray says as the sedan pulls up in front of her grandmother’s home.

“Please. I might be out of the game, but I’m not letting some other Uber driver take the important rides,” Landon Esco says, putting his car in park and unlocking the doors. “Besides, I only had that one IPA all night.”

“Well, it was really nice of you to drive us home,” Lucy Champlain comments from the back seat. She quickly unbuckles her seatbelt. “I’m sorry to run, but I need to hurry inside and use the restroom.”

She gives Tori a quick tap on the shoulder, and when Tori turns her head, Lucy raises her eyebrows with a silent order: Use this time right! Then Lucy slides out of the car and hurries into Paula‘s house.

After drawing a deep breath, Tori undoes her own seatbelt and turns slightly toward Landon, rather than making a move to exit the car. Ed Sheeran’s lively “Azizam” plays quietly through the car’s speakers.

“Lucy and I really do appreciate the ride home,” Tori says.

Landon grins. “Like I said… precious cargo.”

“So we’re precious?” she replies with a smile.

He rolls his eyes. “I don’t want to give you a big head or anything.”

“I think I can handle it.”

Their gazes lock. Tori isn’t sure what else to say, or if she should say anything. She sees in Landon — or thinks she sees — the same intensity that she is feeling. The air is charged with an electric crackle. Their faces draw closer…

…until a loud banging on the car window shatters the moment.

“Where is she?” a voice demands, and they both look to see Bryce outside the passenger side of the vehicle, wild with rage.

—–

Inside the house, Lucy enters the kitchen and is surprised to see Sarah Fisher Gray at the table, despite the late hour.

“Hey there,” Sarah says, looking up from her laptop. “Did you guys have fun?”

“Well… we did,” Lucy says.

Sarah cocks her head to the left. “What does that mean?”

“My boyfriend — ex-boyfriend — showed up at the bar demanding that I talk to him. Landon and the owner of the bar — I forget his name–“

“Jimmy?”

“Yeah! Jimmy. He and Landon got Bryce to back off and leave.”

“That’s good,” Sarah says. “Where’s Tori?”

“She’s still outside with Landon. I thought I’d give them a minute to say goodnight.”

Now a sly grin spreads over Sarah’s face. “Got it. And I hope you all got to have fun once your ex was taken care of.”

Lucy crosses to the cupboard to get herself a water glass. “We did, yeah. There was some other thing going on that I didn’t totally understand.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Tori’s cousin Spencer — your nephew, I guess — showed up, too,” Lucy explains as she fills her glass from the spout built into the refrigerator door. “I get confused about how everyone is related.”

“So do I, sometimes. What happened with Spencer?”

“He came in yelling about how Travis must have had something to do with some lady dying. I didn’t totally follow the story.”

Sarah closes her laptop. “Loretta Ragan? Spencer thinks Travis had something to do with her murder?”

Lucy shrugs, almost shrinking into herself as if she has crossed a line. “I think? I don’t want to speak out of turn…”

“You’re not,” Sarah assures her as she stands from her chair. “But I wonder how the hell Travis ties into any of this. I don’t think he’s been on anyone’s radar.”

Lucy nervously sips her water. “I’m not sure. But Spencer seemed really mad.”

“I’m going to have to find out more about that in the morning,” Sarah says, her investigative senses tingling as she processes this news.

—–

In the darkened kitchen of Juanita Jimenez‘s little green house, Rosie Jimenez finishes the last few Goldfish crackers from the bag and then crumples it up.

“I had almost forgotten how good drunk snacking is,” Rosie says with a hushed laugh.

Her husband closes the refrigerator. “I know. It’s dangerous.”

Rosie tosses the compacted Goldfish bag into the trashcan. “I need to go brush my teeth before I eat another meal’s worth of snacks. You ready for bed?”

“I’ll be up in a minute,” Travis tells her, leaning over to give her a kiss on the lips. “And I really am sorry about before. I don’t know why Spencer has decided to come after me.”

“Because he’s angry and firing in whatever direction he can,” she says. “As long as there’s no big secret about you and Elly…”

Travis hesitates for a fraction of a second before responding, “I explained, we ran into each other while you were away and agreed to put down the swords. That’s all.”

“Then we’re good.” She gives him another quick kiss. “I’ll see you upstairs.”

“I’ll be up in a minute. Just one more snack…”

Rosie playfully hits him on the shoulder before disappearing through the doorway. Moments later, he hears her footfalls on the creaky old steps.

Travis pulls open the refrigerator again, but rather than root around for leftovers to eat, he simply uses the door as a shield and pulls out his phone. He unlocks it and scrolls through his contacts. His finger lingers over Elly’s contact information, but he hesitates to tap it.

I shouldn’t put any of this in writing, he thinks to himself. Still, a massive part of him feels compelled to reach out to Elly and get their story straight. Lying to Rosie makes him feel awful — he feels a searing pain in his gut right now, and guilt is pressing down on him like an anvil’s unrelenting weight — but he doesn’t know what else to do. His mind carries him back to the night of the Objection gala, when he found out from Juanita that Rosie had skipped town without even informing him…

He remembers sitting on the edge of their bed upstairs, reeling from the news that his wife had simply disappeared without notice. Rage was boiling his blood, and an energy surged through him that forced him into action, whether it was a good idea or not.

“This is all your fault,” he recalls saying out loud to the empty room, but with a cutting precision directed at the person he still blames for the entire situation with Gabrielle.

The recollections of that night continue. He turned off the music that automatically played from his phone when he got into his car; he drove in stark silence to his destination. He sat behind the wheel for several minutes — three, maybe five — before mustering the resolve to open that car and do what he went there to do.

He shudders at the memories. He can see himself, as if watching from outside his own body, slipping out the side door of the Ragan house’s garage. He can see her face so clearly, fiery red hair framing it as she looked at him in shock:

“Travis? What the hell are you doing here?”

He remembers having two thoughts almost simultaneously:

Oh, shit.

Elly, what are you doing here?!

—–

“Where is she?” Bryce presses, with anger practically radiating off him.

“You’re acting like a stalker,” Tori tells him defiantly through the window.

“Lock the door,” Landon says, but before Tori can process the order, Bryce has ripped the passenger door open.

“Where’d she go?” he asks again.

“Buddy, you need to go home,” Landon says as he quickly unfastens his seatbelt and steps out of the car. He holds up his iPhone. “I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave now.”

“Did you follow us home from the bar?” Tori asks in disbelief.

“Lucy already went inside. She’s safe,” Landon tells him. “I’m giving you 60 seconds to beat it or I call the police.”

Bryce simply stands there, fists clenched, eyes wide with rage. Tori reaches over and loudly honks the horn of Landon’s car.

“I just wanna talk to my girl,” Bryce fumes.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you. Not tonight, at least,” Landon says. “Forty five seconds.”

Tori honks the horn again. Its shrill cry fills the sleepy neighborhood. A few darkened windows light up as residents hear the commotion. The door of the Fisher home flies open, and Sarah appears in her sweatshirt and shorts.

“What is going on out here? Tori? Landon?” she calls.

“So she’s in there,” Bryce says, and he bolts for the Fisher house. He races up the front steps, barreling toward Sarah.

“Bryce? What are you doing here?” Lucy asks from behind Sarah.

“Not much,” Sarah says, and she lets Bryce come at her — then, at the last moment, she juts out her elbow, hitting him in the chest and knocking the wind out of him. Before he can react, she grabs his arm and wrenches it behind his back, eliciting a groan of agony from Bryce.

“What the fuck? Let go of me!” he shouts.

“Call the police,” Sarah hollers to Landon.

“Already on it,” he answers, lifting the iPhone to his ear.

“Let go of me,” Bryce spits, squirming as Sarah grasps onto him. She squeezes his arm harder, causing him to groan in pain. “That fucking hurts!”

“Think about this next time you try and trespass in a former cop’s home,” she says, once again tightening her grip.

—–

Upstairs in the Jimenez home, Rosie finishes brushing her teeth. She turns off the water and stores her toothbrush back in the stainless steel cup on the windowsill, right beside Travis’s brush. The sight of their toothbrushes resting side-by-side, so lazily, makes her contemplate their marriage… how tense everything has felt for a long time, since before they had to give up Gabrielle.

She winces with shame as she remembers how she abruptly left King’s Bay without even telling Travis. She was hurting so badly and needed space; visiting Sebastian in Seattle gave her that. But she hates not knowing exactly what happened while she was gone. Their confrontation with Spencer at the bar earlier is fresh in her mind:

“I heard you,” Spencer says. “The day you showed up at Elly’s apartment. I was there.”

“You were there?!” Travis asks incredulously.

Rosie’s voice takes on an edge as she demands of her husband, “You were at Elly’s apartment? When?”

“A long time ago,” Travis says with exasperation. “I went to talk to her about — about how she and I patched things up while you were out of town.” Now he glares at Spencer again. “What were you doing there?”

She wants to believe Travis that this is simply about him and Elly mending fences, and she knows that Spencer’s rage is about a lot more than her husband. He is hurting and angry and wants to blame someone for it. But the way it keeps coming up, and the fact that they now know Elly was at the Ragan house on the night Loretta died… it all gets her police officer instincts going. Something has to be up.

“What aren’t you telling me, Travis?” she wonders aloud. “And why?”

END OF EPISODE 1261

Are you shocked that Travis ran into Elly that night?
Will Rosie be able to excavate the truth?
Has Sarah neutralized Bryce for good?
Talk about it all in the comments below!

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