Next Day
The clinic smelled faintly of citrus and antiseptic, a clean, ordered scent that felt almost like a rebuke to the mess Brendon carried with him. It was a small private practice tucked between a florist and a bookshop on a narrow Ridgecliff lane — the kind of place that traded on discretion and silence. He had been here before; Donna's card lived in the wallet he rarely opened. Today, he had made himself come.
Only one person was in the waiting room when he pushed the glass door inward. A sculpted plant breathed beside an armchair; a magazine lay face-down. And across from him sat Devina Foxington, all soft shoulders and sharply tailored blouse, her coat folded neatly on the seat beside her. She had her legs crossed, posture casual in a way that had the effect of being both deliberate and effortless.
Brendon's mouth went dry for a second — not from nerves so much as the recognition of a private note in a public life. He knew Devina's face from council meetings, from meetings with the mayor, from the polite distance of the town's polite press. She belonged to a different tier of Ridgecliff: long before the recent scandals she was part of the scaffolding that kept the town pretending to run.
She looked up as he entered. For a fraction of a second the smile that touched the corners of her eyes was pure surprise, as if two strangers had collided and one had been expected. Lavender floated around her — the perfume he'd learned to associate with the Ninja Fox, faint and unmistakable.
"Sheriff." Devina's voice was warm, quietly amused. "I didn't expect to see you here."
"You must be a regular," Brendon said, trying to bury the stray suspicion behind a neutral tone. He kept his hand on the door as he stepped in, as if it were easier to leave than to sit.
She tilted her head. "You're the one who should be asking questions. What brings Ridgecliff's so called lawman to a small clinic? A crisis of conscience or a dramatic hallucination from those crime thriller novels?"
Brendon closed the door behind him and let the click settle between them. "You're the assistant mayor. If anyone should be hiding out in a clinic, I'd imagine it'd be you. Why are you here then?"
She laughed, the sound light and ridiculous. "You detectives. Keep your questions. I assume you'll file them as evidence later: 'Question asked of official, official laughed.' It'll go in a thin folder that will take a year to come up at a committee meeting."
They were both smiling now, artificially amiable. The first layer of distance unclenched.
"You caught me," Devina admitted. "I come by in the mornings. Donna and I — we're old friends. We grew up near each other." She said it casually, but the pause that followed carried history. "We talk at this time."
Brendon sat down opposite her. His jacket made a dull thump against the chair. He took her in more carefully: the way her coat smelled of lavender, the considerate softness of her hands, the way her jaw set when she listened.
"How old are you, Mrs. Foxington?" he heard himself ask, a question that was rude only if asked without context.
She blinked, surprised. "Twenty-nine."
Brendon's mouth betrayed him — a small, involuntary exhale. "But... you look younger."
"Yoga and stubborn denial of midlife," she said, amusement dancing at the corners of her tone. "You?"
"Twenty-six." He added it like a fact rather than an offering. It felt unnecessary to state, but the numbers had a currency here — youth measured against responsibility.
"So young." She sounded genuinely impressed. "Which, depending on how you think of the world, is either a blessing or a curse."
Their conversation folded around small things at first: the coffee in the clinic's machine, the painting on the wall, the rusted postbox devouring the neighborhood's flyers outside. Gentle, ordinary topics. It felt odd to sit in the same room as someone who had once been so far away on a map of authority.
Then the door opened and Donna appeared in the doorway like a second scene unfolding.
Donna looked exactly like a clinician: sensible shoes, neat blouse, soft gray hair cropped close in a no-nonsense bob. When she smiled at Brendon, there was fatigue in it, but also something like relief.
"Mr. Wolf." She crossed the few steps and, without ceremony, set a steaming cup on the small table between them. "So nice of you to show up where you're meant to be."