Chapter 3 Inherited Hatred

POV: Scott

Coffee's gone cold by the time Scott remembers it's sitting on his desk, and he's three signatures deep into a stack of budget requests that never seem to shrink no matter how many he clears. Cedar Hollow's sheriff department runs on a shoestring and a prayer these days, six deputies covering a county that used to need twice that when the mill was still running. He signs the last form, tosses the pen down, and that's when Priya leans into his doorway, phone still in her hand like she's mid-scroll.

"You hear who's back in town?"

"Should I care?" Scott doesn't look up from the next folder.

"Vanessa Dalton."

The name lands wrong. Not loud, not dramatic, just wrong, like a floorboard giving slightly under weight that should hold it. Scott's pen, which he'd already set down, somehow ends up back in his hand, turning end over end between his fingers before he notices he's doing it.

"Come again?"

"Vanessa Dalton." Priya says it slower this time, watching his face with the sharp, unbothered curiosity of someone who wasn't raised in this town and doesn't understand yet what the name is supposed to do to people. "Her mom had a cardiac thing last night, ambulance and everything. Word is Vanessa drove in first thing this morning. Half the diner's already talking about it."

"Of course they are." Scott hears the edge in his own voice and doesn't love it. "Anything official come through? Complaint, incident, anything actually requiring a badge?"

"Nope. Just gossip." Priya shrugs, already turning to go, then pauses in the doorway like she's reconsidering something. "You okay? You've got a face on."

"I've got the face I always have."

"Sure." She doesn't believe him, doesn't push it either, and disappears back down the hall toward the dispatch desk, leaving Scott alone with a budget folder he can no longer pretend to focus on.

He sits there a long moment, pen still turning between his fingers, and tries to locate exactly where the reaction is coming from. It isn't grief, he was young when Jo Calloway disappeared, barely knew her beyond a few shared classes and the general small-town overlap of everyone's lives bleeding into everyone else's. It isn't even, if he's honest with himself, real conviction that Vanessa Dalton did anything wrong. What it is, sitting hot and unwelcome in his chest, is something closer to inheritance, his father's fury handed down like a family heirloom nobody asked for, worn smooth from twelve years of use.

He remembers being nine, ten years old, watching his father tape photographs to the garage wall after dinner instead of watching television with the rest of the family. He remembers his mother's voice through the closed bedroom door, tired in a way that had nothing to do with being tired, saying Walt, you have got to let this go, and his father's voice cutting back, flat and immovable, I will let it go when that girl finally tells the truth. He remembers his mother's car in the driveway one morning and gone the next, and nobody in the house ever quite explaining why, though Scott had understood, even as a kid, that the explanation lived somewhere in that garage.

Twelve years, and that girl still doesn't have a name in this house. She's just that girl. The shame the family never got to put down.

Scott shoves the folder aside and stands up so fast his chair rolls back and cracks against the filing cabinet.

He tells himself he's doing rounds. That's the excuse he gives himself pulling out of the lot, patrol truck idling rougher than it should on a cold engine, heater blasting lukewarm air that hasn't caught up yet. Rounds through town, past the hospital, nothing unusual about that. He does this route two, three times a week regardless of who's in it.

The first pass, he doesn't even slow down. Just clocks the hospital lot as he drives by — half full, ordinary Tuesday traffic, nothing worth a second look. He tells himself that's that. Drives another six blocks toward the old mill road before some part of his brain, quieter and more honest than the part running his mouth, turns the truck around without asking permission first.

Second pass, he slows enough to actually scan the lot, and there it is, a car he doesn't recognize, out-of-county plates, parked crooked in a way that says someone got out of it in a hurry and didn't care how it looked. He doesn't know it's hers. He just knows, with the same certainty he'd feel clocking a stolen vehicle, that it's not from around here, and it wasn't here yesterday.

He pulls into the lot before he's decided to.

Parks three spaces down from the mystery car, close enough to read the plate if he wanted to run it, which he absolutely should not be doing on a personal errand that isn't actually police business. He kills the engine. Sits there with both hands still on the wheel, ten and two, like he's driving even though the truck's not moving.

Welfare check, he tells himself. Mother had a cardiac event. Community's small. People check on each other. That's the job.

It's not the job. He knows it's not the job the second he thinks it, because if it were the job he'd have called ahead, or sent a card, or done literally anything other than drive past a hospital twice like a teenager circling a party he wasn't invited to. He's not here as the sheriff. He's here as Walt Bradley's son, and some ugly, unexamined part of him wants to walk through those doors and see for himself whether the woman his father spent over a decade hunting looks like a killer up close, or just looks like a person, the way people who aren't monsters usually do.

He gets as far as unbuckling his seatbelt. Gets as far as reaching for the door handle, cold metal under his palm, one good pull away from committing to whatever this is.

And stops.

Hand still on the handle, engine ticking as it cools, Scott sits in the driver's seat of his own patrol truck and admits, for the first time since Priya said her name twenty minutes ago, that he genuinely does not know what he's doing here. Not the polite version, not checking on a resident, not routine rounds, the real answer, the one he doesn't have.

He's not here for the department. He's not here for his father, not exactly, though the shape of his father's twelve-year obsession is riding shotgun in this truck whether Scott invited it or not. He's not even sure he's here out of hatred, inherited or otherwise, because hatred doesn't usually come with this many second thoughts.

Through the windshield, the hospital's sliding doors hiss open, spilling a burst of fluorescent light onto the pavement, and for one suspended second Scott's certain he's about to see her walk out and has absolutely no plan for what he'll do, or say, or feel, if she does.