“Footprints”
Episode #510
Previously…
- Courtney gave birth to her and Jason’s daughter, whom they named Sophie.
- Ryan remained estranged from the Fishers and began writing a memoir for Vision Publishing.
- Brian told Diane that he was offered a job at their old firm in Los Angeles.
- Elly returned to King’s Bay to visit Danielle, just as Travis hooked up with his classmate, Amelia.
JASON FISHER & ALEX MARSHALL’S APARTMENT
“You guys look… great,” Lauren Brooks says as Courtney Chase lets her into the apartment.
“You don’t have to bother being polite. We look like hell. We know.” Courtney closes the door and calls out, “Lauren’s here!”
Lauren surveys the apartment. It has never been immaculate, what with Jason and Alex sharing the place, but right now it is one upturned-couch short of looking like a tornado hit it.
Jason, clad in basketball shorts, sweeps into the room with the baby. “And now it’s time for… It’s Sophie!”
“Oh my God. She’s already bigger,” Lauren says, moving over to have a closer look at the baby. She is still unbelievably tiny, but she somehow appears older than she did in the hospital. “Guys, she’s so cute.”
“Thanks,” Courtney and Jason say in almost-but-not-quite unison.
“Wanna hold her?” Courtney asks.
“Um… yeah.” Lauren does, but Sophie seems so fragile that it also makes her very nervous. She settles down on the couch, and Jason carefully places the newborn in her arms.
Once they are settled, Lauren asks, “So is it harder than you expected?”
Courtney and Jason trade a look--the same look. Somehow they manage to make the exact same expression. Lauren can’t quite define it: it isn’t negative, but there is something completely exhausted and flustered about it all the same.
“The dumbest thing,” Courtney says, “is that I am so bad at burping her. I don’t know why. I’m scared of hurting her or something.”
“Luckily burping has never been a problem for me,” Jason says.
Lauren wiggles a finger on the tip of the baby’s nose.
“She’s pretty good at night, but I think we’ve driven Alex out,” he says. “He’s been spending most of his time at Seth’s.”
Courtney sighs. “We close on the house this week, so we can move in there and he can have the apartment back. I feel bad that we basically kicked him out…”
A knock on the door lands in the middle of the conversation. Courtney moves across the room to get it.
“Wow, we haven’t had two non-parent visitors since she was born,” Jason remarks to Lauren.
And then Courtney opens the door, revealing Ryan Moriani standing just outside the apartment.
ESCO HOME
As Travis Fisher walks down the sidewalk in board shorts and a t-shirt, Amelia Lau is right by his side. She insisted on having her friends pick Travis up so that they could go to the party together. Now Amelia’s two friends walk several feet ahead of them as they approach Landon’s family’s house.
“I can’t believe Landon’s parents leave him alone in this house all day,” Amelia says. “Do they really think he isn’t going to have people over?”
“Guess he had to inherit his brains from somewhere,” Travis says.
Amelia laughs, a little too forcefully. “This’ll be fun. I’m glad you decided to come.”
He smiles back at her, a bit awkwardly. She reaches down and entwines her fingers with his. They walk the rest of the way to the front door in silence, though for all Travis knows, there are bombs going off all around them--such is the deafening noise inside his head. He didn’t mean to give her the wrong impression. Maybe he was stupid to think they could hook up and not have anything change.
Amelia’s friends head inside the house, and Amelia is about to pull him along as well, but Travis pauses on the front porch.
“Look,” he begins, “I think…”
She waits. “What?”
“I think maybe we should--”
“Trav!” Landon rockets into the open doorway. “I have a surprise for you.”
“Can it wait two minutes?” Travis asks, though he is secretly grateful for the interruption. As much as he wants to get this over with, he has no idea how to say it, especially without feeling like a complete jerk.
Landon, oblivious as always, calls out into the house. “Hey! Come here!”
An instant later, Elly Vanderbilt appears behind Landon. “Hey!”
“Elly. Hi.” Travis yanks his hand away from Amelia’s. He can’t tell if Elly noticed that they were holding hands.
“I ran into her and convinced her to come over and surprise you,” Landon says, beaming with oblivious pride. “Pretty good surprise, huh?”
Travis smiles at Elly and, out of the corner of his eye, catches Amelia glaring at him. “Definitely a surprise,” he manages to say.
VISION PUBLISHING
Diane Bishop’s knees scrape against the industrial carpeting of her office. She makes a mental note to yell at someone for allowing Brillo pads to be installed as carpet, then returns her attention to the task at hand: figuring out how to get her damn printer to work again.
“Shouldn’t you be yelling at an intern or an IT guy or someone, not doing that yourself?”
She turns to see Brian Hamilton entering her office, an amused smirk on his face.
“IT said they couldn’t send anyone up for forty five minutes,” she says. “I don’t have forty five minutes.”
“If you have something to print, just e-mail it to me, and--”
“I just want my printer fixed!” she snaps, clutching a cable in each hand. “Do you understand this crap?”
Brian joins her on the floor. “I actually wanted to talk to you.”
The tone of his voice gives Diane a pretty good idea what this is about. Brian takes the cables from her hands and evaluates the situation, tracing one line from the printer and the other back to… something or other. It all looks the same to her.
“I’m going to take the job,” he says. “In L.A.”
Diane just nods. She doesn’t really know what to say. Good for you? Congrats?
“You’re sure you want to live in L.A. again?” she asks.
“Hey, I liked L.A. I’ll like it again. And it’s the right move for me. Career-wise, I mean.”
She watches as he plugs in something, then unplugs something else, then springs to his feet and goes around the desk. He hovers over her computer, clicks the mouse a few times, and the printer whirrs to life.
“How’d you do that?” she demands.
Brian comes back around to the back of the computer and shows her: “You were trying to plug it into the wrong spot.”
She glowers at him and rocks back to sit on her feet. “So L.A., huh?”
“L.A.,” Brian says, drawing in a deep breath and then letting it roll out of him again.
JASON FISHER & ALEX MARSHALL’S APARTMENT
Jason registers that Ryan is standing just outside the apartment, but it does not quite seem real. He makes no move toward his half-brother--he simply remains in place, trying to process this development.
“Congratulations,” Ryan says. He extends a gift bag, which Courtney accepts automatically.
“Um,” Courtney says, turning back to look at Jason and Lauren. With a nod, Jason reassures her that it is okay, at least for the time being. “Maybe Lauren and I should… go put the baby down for her nap.”
Lauren is already on her feet. “Good idea.”
Courtney takes the baby from Lauren, and the women quickly exit. Jason observes as Ryan watches Sophie--his niece--be swept out of the room. Tentatively Jason approaches the doorway. He and Ryan remain locked in a staredown, the silence pressing down upon them.
“I wanted to congratulate you and Courtney,” Ryan says. Jason cannot decide if the words are worse than the silence.
“Thank you.”
It has been a year since Jason even saw Ryan, since the day Ryan came to the arena to plead his case. Their encounter was so brief that Jason hardly can believe it took place at all; there are so many more things he wishes that he had said to Ryan, though they are largely variations on the same theme.
“Why even bother?” Jason asks. “This isn’t going to--”
“Because you’re my brother. I had to at least let you know that I’m happy for you. I had to see the baby, just to know…” Ryan trails off, his gaze lost somewhere in the carpet. “I spent too long without a real family. You guys might not want me, but I need to at least… see that it all exists, still.”
Jason can see hints of another man, the brother he was getting to know and working closely with prior to the revelation that Ryan had shot Nick. They had a bond, and it was real. Or it felt that way, at any rate. Nothing between them could have been real, not in light of what Ryan did to Tim.
It still turns Jason’s stomach to think of the way that he sided with Ryan over Tim for months and months.
“I know you owe me absolutely nothing,” Ryan says. “Believe me, I know that. But I wanted to wish you well.”
“What about the book?” Jason asks. The news of Ryan’s book sent their family into such a tailspin earlier this year, until Bill, of all people, convinced them all to accept it and move on with their lives.
Ryan flushes. “I’m still working on it.”
“You can’t really expect any of us to forgive you while you’re exploiting what you did to us by writing that thing, can you?”
“Would you forgive me if I stopped writing it?”
Ryan already knows the answer. He steps back from the open door.
“Congratulations,” he says again, retreating away from the apartment.
Jason watches him go, marveling at the fact that this man--this stranger--came from the same mother that he did.
JASON FISHER & ALEX MARSHALL’S APARTMENT
In the bedroom, Courtney sits on the bed with Sophie, who isn’t quite ready for a nap. Lauren paces back and forth, pausing periodically to listen at the door for signs of an altercation between Jason and Ryan.
“Do you think it was a good idea to leave them alone?” Lauren asks.
“Jason has to deal with it, one way or another. They were getting really close, and then--bam--we found out what Ryan did, and it was all over.” Courtney pauses to look down at her daughter, checking in on her as she feels compelled to do at least once a minute. “I’m actually glad we get a few minutes alone. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
Lauren stops pacing and awaits details.
“Have you ever gotten… I don’t know… a weird vibe from Sabrina?” Courtney asks.
“I haven’t really spent time around her,” Lauren says, “but if she’s sleeping with Josh, you know there’s got to be something off about her.”
“Something is definitely off.” Courtney glances at the closed door; she would rather Jason not hear any of this, not yet. “The day I had Sophie--right before I went into labor--Sabrina tried to pick a fight with me about being a stay-at-home mom. She basically accused me of being a bad person for wanting to go back to work.”
“So she’s a Republican,” Lauren says with a laugh. “Not my choice, but…”
Normally Courtney would at least acknowledge the joke, but this situation has been eating at her privately for too long, and she just needs to get it all out. “It was like she was trying to get me worked up. Then Jason came in, and he was trying to calm us down, and when he had his back turned--she made a face at me.”
“What kind of face?”
“Bitchy. Like a really bratty kid. It was weird.”
Lauren paces again as she considers the situation. “Tell Jason to fire her if she’s that much of a bitch.”
Courtney shakes her head. “I don’t want Jason to know. Not yet. She already has him thinking I’m on the edge.”
“So what do you do? Sit back and take it? Does she have a weave? Maybe you could rip out her weave and set it on fire.”
This time, Courtney cannot help but laugh. “That should solve it. Thank you.”
“I think I got that from Tyra,” Lauren says.
They lose another few seconds to laughter before Courtney manages to refocus. “I want to look into Sabrina… something is weird. I need to know what her deal is.”
“Because that’s what the mother of a newborn needs to be doing. Investigating bitchy coworkers.”
“Which is where you come in. I need your help, Lauren. I…” Courtney knows that her suspicions about Sabrina are so much graver than the evidence she has; she cannot explain the horrible feeling she gets when she thinks about this woman. “I don’t trust her. I want to check up on her resumé, things like that. Just to see.”
Lauren does not hesitate. “Okay.”
And then, for no discernible reason, Sophie starts to cry again. Courtney returns her focus to decoding what kind of cry this is: hunger, diaper, sleepy, etc. Simply having been able to voice her concerns over Sabrina has been an enormous relief, but she already feels something mounting in her: a desire to know exactly where the woman came from and why she ostensibly hates Courtney so much.
ESCO HOME
Travis wants to turn and run away. Not the slickest move, sure, but anything is better than being trapped here between Amelia and Elly.
“It’s good to see you,” Elly says, but he can see her looking at Amelia, too, trying to get a read on the dynamic.
“You, too,” Travis says. “Where’d, uh, where’d you and Landon run into each other?”
“The mall.”
“Look at these new kicks,” Landon says, presenting his right foot and its brand-new Nike. Travis is about to pursue an extensive conversation about the shoes--anything to take the focus off him--when Amelia interrupts.
“We haven’t met,” she says to Elly. “I’m Amelia.”
“Elly.” The girls shake hands.
“Amelia’s a friend of ours,” Travis says. “From school.” He sees Amelia bristle at the word friend. This is so not what he thought he was getting into when they hooked up.
And then Amelia does it: “Well, I wouldn’t say we’re just friends, Travis…”
Travis watches Elly. He swears that he sees her face turn a shade paler.
“I actually need to get going,” she says abruptly. “I promised Danielle I’d help her with the twins. I just wanted to see you so I could say hi.” She moves past them and out of the house.
“Hold up,” Landon says.
“No, I really have to go.”
As she descends the front steps, Travis wants to chase after her, but he feels Amelia at his side, like some force holding him back.
“Nice meeting you!” Amelia calls out to Elly.
That is all it takes for Travis to pull away from her. She is enjoying this way too much. He moves to take off after Elly.
“Where are you going?” Amelia asks, almost demands.
“I have to do something.”
Landon makes a face. “Was that bad?”
“You’re an idiot. I hope you know that,” Travis says, pausing long enough to shake his head at his buddy before he continues down the steps and away from the house. He has to talk to Elly.
END OF EPISODE #510
Has Travis blown it with Elly?
Will Courtney and Lauren figure out who Sabrina is?
Is leaving King’s Bay the right move for Brian?
Discuss this episode with us in the Footprints Forum!
