Amid the wash of emotions Keith Papini experienced upon learning his missing wife was found alive, there was a singular moment of pure joy: the smile on his 4-year-old son’s face when he told him the great news.

“I sat [Tyler] down, and I was on my knees and he was standing up,” said Papini, the husband of California mom Sherri Papini, who was allegedly kidnapped while out jogging on Nov. 2 and found on Thanksgiving Day. “And I said, ‘You know what, buddy? I found Mom.'”

“And he got the biggest grin,’” Papini continued, adding that he then broke the news to an equally elated Violet, the couple’s 2-year-old daughter.

“I wanted to do it one by one,” he said.

Papini, in an interview to be aired Friday on ABC’s “20/20,” said he briefly chatted with his 34-year-old wife after she was rescued by a California Highway Patrol officer on a stretch of road in Yolo County, Calif., on Nov. 24.

“It was my wife screaming in the background, yelling my name, and a CHP [California High Patrol] officer that seemed somewhat confused at the moment, like, ‘What is going on?’” Papini said. “And [the officer] said, ‘I need you to be calm. I need you to be calm.’ … I already know it’s her. I can tell her voice.”

He continued: “I get the phone and, [I said], ‘Oh my God, honey.’ And of course she’s screaming,” Papini recalled. “It’s very emotional. And, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you, oh my God, you’re here. You’re back. Where are you?’ And then the phone gets taken away from her. Like, super quick.”

Sherri Papini was allegedly kidnapped by two armed Hispanic women while out for a run in Mountain Gate, Calif.

Over the next three weeks, she was allegedly beaten, tortured and burned by the perpetrators.

The kidnappers finally dumped her on the side of the I-50 highway and sped off in a dark SUV.

Police are still searching for the suspects.