Amidst the storm of crime and investigation, Days Of Our Lives still hasn’t forgotten its “specialty”: complicated love affairs that make fans both ship and worry.

This week, the emotional spotlight falls on the Brady – Sarah – Xander trio.

Everything starts out pretty normally: Brady and Sarah sit together, sharing their own fatigue.

Brady is all too familiar with the fact that his life is a never-ending series of dramas – from fatherhood, family matters to broken loves.

Sarah isn’t much better: messy marriages, losses, decisions that cost her her heart. When those two tired people sit together, drink a cup of coffee and say “I understand,” an emotional buffer is created – and in that buffer, sparks begin to appear.

Spoiler: “sparks fly between Brady and Sarah,” meaning the two are more than just friends complaining. A touch, a look that’s a little too long, a seemingly innocuous compliment that makes someone’s heart skip a beat – that’s how Days often marks the beginning of a new relationship. The irony is that both Brady and Sarah know that they’re not “blank slates.” They carry heavy emotional baggage, exes, wounds, broken promises. That’s why this flutter is both sweet – because after so much pain, they feel something beautiful – and sour, because they both vaguely understand: no one around them will see this relationship as “simple.”

The first to be hit hard is Xander. While Brady and Sarah unconsciously draw closer, Xander reaches out to Marlena to do what he rarely does: tell the truth. Under Marlena’s calm guidance, Xander takes off his usual gruff armor, admits that he feels inferior, that he’s broken a lot of things, that deep down, he’s just a man who wants to be trusted but doesn’t know how to stop disappointing others.