PART 1 — The Night She Walked In
It was one of those nights that didn’t feel like anything important should happen.
Not in a town like Ashford Ridge, anyway.
By 9:40 p.m., the police station had already slipped into that slow, half-asleep rhythm that comes after paperwork outweighs urgency. Officer Daniel Hayes sat behind the front desk, flipping through a report about a stolen lawnmower he suspected would turn out to be a neighbor dispute by morning. The overhead light near the filing cabinets flickered in a tired, unreliable pulse, and somewhere down the hall, an old printer hummed like it had given up caring whether anyone noticed.
Daniel had been on the force long enough to recognize patterns. Small towns didn’t lack problems—they just dressed them up to look ordinary. A missing dog. A loud argument. A broken window that “probably wasn’t anything.”
