Chapter 4 Professional Courtesy

POV: Scott

Doors hiss open and it's not her, just an orderly wheeling out an empty gurney, hospital light spilling across the pavement for a second before the doors slide shut again. Scott sits there feeling foolish, hand still on the handle, doing nothing.

He gets out anyway.

Tells himself it's still the welfare check, still community outreach, still something he could explain to Priya with a straight face if she asked. He walks through the sliding doors with his radio clipped to his shoulder and his boots loud on the tile, and the woman at the front desk glances up, recognizes the uniform before she recognizes him, and offers the kind of automatic respect Cedar Hollow still extends to a badge even when the man wearing it doesn't fully deserve it today.

"Afternoon, Sheriff. Help you with something?"

"Just checking in. Heard Marianne Dalton had a rough night." Not a lie, technically. Just not the whole truth.

"Room 214. She's stable her daughter's with her." The woman says it plainly, no weight on the word daughter, like she hasn't clocked what that means yet, or doesn't care to.

Scott thanks her and heads down the hall before he can talk himself out of it, and that's when he sees her, not in the room, but in the corridor outside it, sitting hunched forward in a plastic chair with her phone dark in one hand, staring at nothing. She doesn't look like the photographs in his father's file. Those photos are twelve years old, a teenager's face, soft around the edges in a way that made the accusations against her feel almost absurd even to a kid who wanted to believe them. This woman's face has gone sharper, more careful, like she's spent over a decade deciding exactly how much of herself to let show at any given time.

She hears his boots before she looks up, and whatever crosses her face in that first half-second, surprise, maybe something almost like fear gets smoothed over so fast Scott almost doubts he saw it at all.

"Sheriff Bradley." She says his title like she's testing the shape of it, deciding whether it fits the boy she might remember from twelve years ago. "Wasn't expecting a badge to show up. Did somebody call this in as an emergency?"

"No emergency." Scott stops a few feet from her chair, close enough to talk without raising his voice, far enough to keep this looking official if anyone walks by. "Just checking on residents. Standard practice when there's a hospitalization."

"You do that for every family in Cedar Hollow, or just mine?"

The question lands exactly where she means it to, calm and precise, no heat in it at all which somehow makes it worse than if she'd shouted. Scott feels his jaw tighten and doesn't correct it fast enough.

"I do it when it's warranted."

"And my mother's heart attack warrants a personal visit from the sheriff." Vanessa's eyebrows lift, faint, unimpressed. "That's a new department policy, or an old habit?"

She's not wrong, and knowing that only sharpens the irritation crawling up the back of his neck. He should turn around right now, tell her to have a good day, walk out and never mention this to anyone. Instead he hears himself say, low and almost before he's decided to say it at all:

"Funny you'd use the word habit. My father used to say the same thing about you, that you had a habit of walking places you shouldn't."

Something shifts behind Vanessa's eyes, quick and controlled, gone almost as fast as it arrives. She sets her phone down on her knee, deliberate, like she needs both hands free for this.

"Your father spent twelve years deciding I was guilty of something nobody could ever actually prove." Her voice stays level, but there's an edge under it now, thin and sharp as wire. "I'm surprised you remember him fondly enough to quote him."

"I didn't say fondly."

"No. You didn't." She stands, and it puts them nearly eye to eye, closer than Scott expected, close enough that he catches the faint, clean smell of hospital soap on her hands and something underneath it that isn't hospital at all. "Is there an actual reason you're here, Sheriff, or did you just want to see if I still flinch when somebody brings up Jo's name?"

"I didn't bring up her name."

"You didn't have to." Vanessa's arms cross over her chest, a wall going up brick by brick right in front of him. "You brought up your father instead. Same weather, different sky."

Scott opens his mouth to push back, to say something about due diligence, about a case that never got properly closed, about a town that's spent twelve years wondering, and stops himself half a breath too late, the words already halfway out before some better instinct catches them.

"I'm not here to relitigate a cold case in a hospital hallway."

"Aren't you?" Something in her expression sharpens, less guarded now, like she's finally decided there's no point pretending this is a courtesy call. "Because that's exactly what this feels like. You show up unannounced, you drop your father's name like a threat, and you're watching me right now the way every deputy in this town watched me for the two years before I finally left." She tilts her head slightly, studying him the way Scott imagines she studies unidentified remains for a living, clinical, unflinching, looking for whatever the surface isn't telling her. "So let's skip the part where you pretend this is about my mother's heart."

Scott doesn't answer right away, and the silence stretches just long enough to become its own kind of confession.

"What do you want me to say?"

"I don't want you to say anything." Vanessa's voice doesn't rise, doesn't crack, stays perfectly, maddeningly level. "I want you to actually answer a question, for once, instead of quoting your father at me like his opinion is supposed to still mean something twelve years later."

"Fine." Scott squares his shoulders, some old, defensive reflex kicking in even as part of him already regrets what he's about to invite. "Ask it."

Vanessa doesn't hesitate.

"Do you actually believe I did it," she says, flat and quiet and utterly without performance, "or is that just what your father left you?"

The corridor goes strangely still around him, a monitor beeping somewhere down the hall, a cart wheel squeaking past, none of it registering the way her question does. Scott opens his mouth, certain there's an answer in there somewhere, some version of yes or no or it's complicated that a sheriff should be able to produce on command about a case his own department still technically considers open.

Nothing comes.

He stands there, badge on his chest, twelve years of his father's certainty sitting in his gut like a stone he's never once tried to lift and examine, and realizes with a discomfort that feels almost like exposure that he genuinely does not know the answer to the one question she's ever asked him honestly.