Right now, we can all guess what The Bold and the Beautiful has planned, right? Since Ridge is for the moment not married to Brooke, he will offer to make Taylor’s dying wish come true and retie the knot with her before she kicks the bucket. And then she’ll live. (It’s a miracle!) And then he’ll dump her and run right back to “my Logan.”

But if the soap would just remember its history, it could tell us a story that’s emotionally richer and a whole lot more surprising. How? By bringing back Taylor’s first husband, Blake Hayes. If you’ll recall, back in the early 1990s, we met the character, an unstable oil baron who was as willing to play dirty as J.R. Ewing ever was. If he returned to L.A. to make amends with his ex, she might be moved by the hard work he has done to change. She might even be tempted to rekindle a romance that she thought was long over. A Kiss Before Dying, that sorta thing.

Observing this, Ridge would, as he always does when Taylor is involved with anyone else, grow jealous. He could even grow so jealous that he interrupts her and Blake’s remarriage ceremony to suggest that in Taylor’s heart, he’s the man she really wants by her side in her final days. He’d be right, too. Even after as many times as he’s broken that same heart, he’s still The One in her mind.

However, believing that she’ll soon be chilling in a coffin, Taylor elects to give Ridge the gift of closure. She swears that she loves Blake with her whole heart, sends Ridge home to Brooke and then… Yes, even in this version of the story, she survives. But now she’s married to a man for whom she cares and yearning for a man she all but worships. How long before the love quadrangle explodes and Ridge cheats on Brooke with Taylor and reawakens Blake’s dark side?

As an added bonus, were Blake to return — maybe now played by Michael Park (Jack, As the World Turns) or Coby Ryan McLaughlin (ex-Shiloh, General Hospital) — Bold & Beautiful would have to address the fact that for some reason Steffy named her and Finn’s son Hayes after her mother’s abusive first husband!