Previously…
- Elly told Danielle that she is ready to meet her biological father. Danielle promised to contact him, despite her own misgivings about bringing him into their lives.
- Sandy and Jason found Natalie’s daughter to be a promising young skater, but Sandy made it clear that she has no room in her schedule and suggested that Jason coach the girl instead.
- While looking through security footage with Brent in hopes of finding something to clear Matt’s name, Sarah went into labor.

WAITING ROOM

Brent Taylor is on his feet in the waiting room when his former in-laws finally walk in.

“Graham just came through a minute ago,” he reports to Bill and Paula as he hurries over to them. “He’s headed back to the delivery room now.”

“And everything’s all right with Sarah?” Paula asks.

“So far, so good,” Brent says.

“I certainly didn’t expect the call that she was in labor to come from you,” Bill says.

Brent guides them to a pair of chairs in the mostly empty waiting room. “Believe me, I’m probably more surprised than you are. Sarah and I were at the station going over a case when her water broke.”

“A case?” Bill asks as he tentatively hovers above the chair. “I thought Sarah wasn’t working with any clients right now.”

“It’s… a personal thing,” Brent answers. A look passes among the three of them that seems to answer the question without actually speaking any words.

“I figure I might as well hang out for a bit,” Brent says as he takes a seat across from them. “I was here for the last time Sarah had someone else’s baby… Why not keep the streak going?”

Truth be told, he wants to keep as much of an eye on Graham as possible. He knows that there is little chance of discovering evidence that Graham set up Matt before the baby comes, but at least this way, he can feel as though he is looking out for Sarah and the baby that is about to be born.

DELIVERY ROOM

“I hope I’m not too late!” Graham Colville announces as he enters in the light blue scrubs that a nurse gave him.

“Not at all,” says Dr. Osmond, a man in his forties with deep lines around his eyes and rapidly graying hair poking out from beneath his plain black surgical cap. 

From her position in the bed, where she is about as exposed as she could possibly be, Sarah forces a smile up at her husband. “Hi.”

Graham takes her hand. “Hi. I’m glad Brent got you here all right.”

“He was great,” she says as another intense feeling begins in her abdomen and then swells to reverberate throughout her body. She squeezes Graham’s hand as the contraction overwhelms her--and this still one of the early ones.

“Try and relax,” Dr. Osmond tells Sarah. “Remember your breathing. Tensing up won’t make this any easier.”

“Yes,” Graham says from the side of the bed. “Relax.”

He is trying to be soothing, and there is nothing overtly menacing about him, but even the sight of this man is making her contractions more painful. Sarah clenches her eyes shut and block out all thoughts of the future as she tries to lose herself in her breathing exercises.

Danielle Taylor drums her fingers along the edge of the copper-topped table as she waits with her coffee. She picked a seat in clear view of the coffee shop’s front door, and every time that door swings open, her breath catches in her throat. Could this be it? She is worried that she won’t recognize him.

Of course, when he finally walks through the door--nearly fifteen minutes after their appointed meeting time--she realizes how absurd that notion is. Jimmy Trask in 2012 looks exactly like the Jimmy Trask she remembers, only with several years added to his tally. His hair isn’t long enough to be pulled into a ponytail anymore, and his face is more cleanly shaven than she remembers it being, but he is still a little too shaggy and a little too tan for a grown man--exactly, she realizes, as she always knew he would look at this age.

She sees Jimmy before he sees her, and it gives her a moment to appraise him fully. He wears flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a loose-fitting shirt buttoned barely more than halfway. When he spots her, he lights up and comes rushing over.

“Dani!” he says in that same gregarious fashion she remembers so well. She stands from her chair, and he wraps her in a big, strong hug.

“It’s good to see you,” Jimmy says as they break their embrace. He takes a step backward so that he can fully take her in. “You look awesome. Still so pretty. Things are good?” “Things are good,” she says as she takes her seat again. “Do you want a coffee?” “Nah, I’m fine. So what have you been up to?” “I’ve been nannying for my brother’s kids,” she says, ready to blow past the subject. “So the reason I got in touch with you…”

“Our daughter.” A smirk stretches over his face. “Do we say that? Or is it, like, not allowed?”

She offers a reassuring smile. “It’s fine. Tom and Melanie are her parents, and she knows that, but it’s complicated and we’ve worked through a lot of that.”

“That’s good. So, what, she just wants to meet me? See who the hell I am?”

“Basically. She’s been curious for a while. I promised her I’d track you down so that the two of you could meet.” She gets stuck for a moment on the fact that she is sitting across from Jimmy, all these years later--all these years after she found out she was pregnant with his baby and had to admit to herself that she was in no place to raise a child. The two of them are bound together forever by Elly’s existence, but she hasn’t even spoken to him in years and years.

“She’s a great kid,” Danielle continues. “She’s finishing her sophomore year in college.”

“I can’t believe I have a kid who’s a sophomore in college,” Jimmy says, shaking his head.

“Me neither. How long do you think you’ll be in town? I can arrange for the two of you to get together…”

He shrugs. “I can stay however long. Drove up from Portland this morning. I’m gonna crash with a pal up here.”

Just like that, she is reminded of exactly why it never even crossed her mind to try and raise that child with Jimmy. It’s oddly reassuring--a confirmation that she made the best decision for Elly, at a time when she could barely make decent decisions for herself.

“Then I’ll set something up,” she says, unable to get past the weirdness of being face-to-face with Jimmy after all this time.

JASON FISHER’S HOUSE

“She was really good,” Jason Fisher says as he clears the plates and other remnants of lunch from the table on the deck. The summer sun shines through the openings in the hemlock trees that tower over the backyard.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Alex Marshall notes as he picks up the ketchup and mustard bottles.

They move through the back door and into the kitchen, where Sophie has already moved on from lunch and is playing “Princess”--a game to which she only knows the rules, which to Jason’s eye mostly seems to involve two dolls mumbling at each other--on the floor.

“I just really don’t know if I want to get back into coaching right now,” Jason says.

“You’re obviously kind of drawn to the idea.”

“Yeah. Of course. I miss being on the ice.” Jason sticks the dirty plates and cutlery in the dishwasher. “But it’s a whole ‘nother set of responsibilities. I wish Sandy hadn’t planted the idea in my head to begin with!”

Alex pauses at the open refrigerator. “I feel like it was already planted, and all she did was water it.”

Jason makes a face at him. “Wow. You must be a writer or something, getting all poetic.” His cell phone sounds an alert in his pocket. “Plus,” he adds as he fishes out his phone, “I really don’t know if I could deal with Diane’s sister.”

“Okay. I can’t do anything but agree with you there.”

The topic of coaching Bree Halston evaporates instantly from Jason’s mind when he reads the text message he just received.

“Sarah’s in labor,” he tells Alex. “They’re at the hospital now.”

The announcement casts an instant pall over Alex. “Oh.”

“Do you want to come? I know you and Graham aren’t on the best of terms, but this is your little brother or sister being born…”

“I know.” Alex stands frozen in the middle of the kitchen. “I know.”

KING’S BAY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
DELIVERY ROOM

Sarah remembers the last time she gave birth so clearly. The contractions felt very similar, the pain that seemed to spread out from her abdomen and through her body. The breathing exercises were almost the same. And she had a husband holding her hand then, too--only she knew that the baby she was giving birth to wasn’t his. Even the hopeful sense that Brent might believe her, that no one would ever know the baby was really Matt’s, wasn’t enough to dull the anxiety inside her--the anxiety that was so overwhelming that she soon told Brent the truth herself, throwing away everything that she had scraped and clawed to hold onto. She still cringes at the thought that she tainted something as pure as Tori’s birth with her lies and manipulations.

She promised herself that the next time would be different. But the next time never came. She lost that baby before she ever went into labor. She had Matt by her side, but what they shared was grief instead of celebration. “Push!” Dr. Osmond’s voice is somewhere in the room, which seems cavernous now. Her eyes are flashing open and closed, Graham’s hand grips hers, and the entire thing feels surreal. Because it’s all wrong again. She is finally having another baby, and her husband is by her side and the baby is his, and it’s still all wrong.

“Give me another push!”

She groans and pushes and feels her body turning itself inside-out. She hears the otherworldly grunt emanating from herself.

She tries to remind herself that she has no proof of Graham’s guilt. She doesn’t know that he lured Matt to that pier, had him beaten and injected with drugs to be killed in a demolition.

But she doesn’t have proof of his innocence, either, and she realizes in this moment--this moment when her body is overrun with such excruciating pain that she cannot possibly tell herself a lie--that that’s what it would take: proof of his innocence. Because she knows Graham is guilty, and all she needs is something to back that up.

“We have a head,” Dr. Osmond announces.

“A head,” Graham repeats excitedly from the side of the bed, stroking her hand as she tries to rest between pushes.

“Let’s push again,” the doctor instructs her, and so she does, and the pain makes her vision blurry and her head pound. She feels it--feels the moment when the baby exits her body, the moment when her second child officially enters the world--but all she can think about is this man beside her, this man with whom she has to go home and raise this baby. She has a terrible, horrible sense of what he might be capable of, and in spite of her efforts to push that aside, it is all she can think about as the doctor rises from between her legs and makes his pronouncement:

“It’s a boy.”

END OF EPISODE #673

What will Sarah do now that she and Graham have a child?
Should Alex go to the hospital to support Graham?
What will Jimmy’s presence mean for Danielle and Elly?
Talk about it all in the Footprints Forum!

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