The Thursday, Oct. 10, episode of The Bold and the Beautiful promises to be a doozy for Hope. She thinks that she and ex-husband Liam have finally figured out how to function well as coparents. But lately he’s been doing a lot of soul searching, the kind that leaves him facepalming and wondering WTH he was doing dumping Hope over her kiss, nothing more, with Thomas. (Review the waffler’s many missteps here.)

Annika Noelle says that her character’s former spouse is pretty blunt about his intentions toward Hope. “It’s shocking to her! She’s like, ‘What do you mean? We finally… have this stable thing for Beth going,’” she tells Soap Opera Digest. “It’s like, ‘Wait, wait, wait — we want to try disrupting that kind of peace that we’ve finally found now?’ After all the years of that toxic cycle they were in?!?”

Liam suggests that he doesn’t want to repeat the past, and certainly not its mistakes, but forge a brighter future together. “But, you know, that’s easier said than done!” the actress points out. “So Hope is absolutely taken aback… She didn’t actually think that Liam was starting to kind of wax [nostalgic] again. So, obviously, she’s in for a pretty big surprise.”

Liam may be in for one himself, too. Hope isn’t going to leave him wondering for long whether she’s willing to give their relationship the old college try. Or at this point, would it be the old grad-school try? Keeping in mind her new entanglement with Carter, Liam’s entreaties “bring even more clarity to her,” Noelle says. “It does technically complicate things, but for Hope, I do think it brings her some clarity about what she wants… and what she doesn’t.”

Sounds to us like it’s a good thing a certain old flame of Liam’s is making tracks back to L.A.! (Check out the pics here.)