It had been almost two and a half years since Gale moved to New York City, and it was coming up on the second anniversary of the day that Dewey left her. Nearly two years, and he still had not spoken a word to her in explanation.

Of course, she had spent hours, days, two years, really, trying to come up with explanations on her own- everything from amnesia from his repeated head injuries to being convinced that he had been kidnapped or even murdered. Why else would her husband of nearly twenty years, the only person who had ever loved her in her 57 years of life, choose to leave her so suddenly, without so much as a note or goodbye?

She knew neither of those more outlandish explanations for Dewey's actions were true by now. Between Sidney, Kinkaid, and her own digging around, she had confirmed to herself that Dewey was alive, had spoken over the phone to at least Sidney and her family, and had returned to Woodsboro. He had made his choice of his own volition and without so much as giving Gale even the courtesy or respect of answering her texts or calls. Clearly, he had left her because he wanted to, and really, no other reason beyond that probably mattered.

But it did. To Gale, it mattered immeasurably, and as the two years without seeing Dewey's face, feeling his touch, or hearing his voice crawled by, in every spare moment she didn't bury herself in activity, she mentally tortured herself with the possible whys.

She had always known that Dewey was the kind of person who didn't need fame or wealth, and he certainly wasn't the kind of person who enjoyed the noise and hustle of life in a major city. Had he resented their relocation for her promotion, no matter what he said about her having her turn and supporting her in her success? Did he secretly hate being the husband of a virtual celebrity, and by his link to her, being made into a semi-celebrity himself? Somehow, no matter how Gale twisted it around it in her brain, the only reasons she could come up with for Dewey leaving her always centered around herself. No matter how much she tried to distract herself or tell herself otherwise, what it came down to in the end in her own mind was that Dewey left her for no other reason than Gale herself.

Gale was well aware that she wasn't an easy person to like, let alone love. She was often self-centered and focused on her goals to the point of being nearly ruthless, and she struggled with balance in all areas of her life. Her relationship with Dewey had certainly been affected by this many times, and although she had always loved him and tried to show him how much he meant to her, she knew that sometimes, her efforts came too late, too awkwardly, or without quite the intended reception from him. Gale had always found it very difficult, even threatening, to verbalize caring and love, and though it was easier to do so for Dewey than it had ever been for her to do with any other person, she still had not always been able to in the timing or way that Dewey might have needed. She knew she wasn't always a good wife to him- hell, she wasn't always a good person to him. She knew that she didn't deserve someone as genuinely good-natured, kind, and open-hearted as Dewey Riley, and still couldn't quite understand how it was that he had come to love her at all. For someone like Dewey, who cared about everyone and everything, to leave someone he knew loved him, without concerning himself at all about how she would feel- well, to Gale, that said everything.

Clearly, Dewey had finally realized that Gale was not a person he could love, or even tolerate speaking to again. Clearly he had realized that he didn't love her, that he hated everything she was and everything she stood for. Maybe he had fallen for someone else, someone like Judy Hicks, who was far closer to the kind of person that Dewey should have gone for in the first place. Maybe he was just tired of all the shit Gale had put him through and had run out of the patience she had thought he had a nearly endless supply of. Maybe he had even come to blame her for all the times he had nearly died, for the deaths of all the people murdered by masked madmen in the past twenty-six years. After all, she had helped set things in motion by advocating for Cotton Weary's innocence; she had written the books on the murders which helped set up the Stab franchise. A high proportion of the murderers had been directly influenced into murdering by the movie series based on her books. In some way, Gale could be considered responsible for much of the pain Dewey had endured, and it was possible to her he had finally come to believe this.

The morning that Dewey left, she had thought at first that he was simply in the shower, or had stepped out to get something without remembering to leave a note. She hadn't worried until she came home from work and found him still missing, without having answered the few texts she had sent through the day. When his phone went directly to voicemail, and she realized that his toothbrush, most of his clothes, and a suitcase were missing, she had started trying to contact him in a near frenzy, fear, anxiety, and shock whirling within her to the point of near panic.

Where are you?!"

"What the fuck is going on, did you leave? Are you leaving me?!"

"Answer the phone!"

"Are you seriously not even going to talk to me?! WHERE ARE YOU?!"

Her texts and voicemails shifted from fear and anger over time, becoming shorter, closer to a plea, and more spaced out in their sending. Eventually she had almost begged him.

"Please, Dewey, just tell me why. I just want to know why."

But he had ignored even that, and that was when Gale knew there was no hope for him having even the bare minimum of care towards her any longer.

It hurt. More than the times he had been seriously injured, more than the times she herself had been shot or stabbed, more than watching people die- more than anything Gale had ever before experienced. It hurt so badly there were days she could barely breathe through the pain, and the only way she could get through it was to fall back into the way she had always coped before- throwing herself into work, shutting down any emotions as much as possible. Gale made herself into a robot more than a person, hiding the bags under her eyes from lack of sleep with professional makeup, fake smiles, and scripted words. She kept everything in her life as fully under her control as possible, losing twelve pounds in the process that might not be noticeable on the TV screen, but were very visible and a medically unhealthy loss in the filter of daily life. Her life became as shallow and empty as the persona she gave herself for the camera, and she tried to get through each day without as minimal feeling as possible.

And then she received Dewey's text. Nearly two years, and his first effort at contacting her was THIS.

"Ghostface is back. Don't come to Woodsboro. Hope all is well 😊 "

….hope all is well? HOPE ALL IS WELL?! And a smiley face?! Just who the fuck did he think she was, that he could leave her in the middle of the night, not speak to her since, warn her that Ghostface was back and presumedly after him, and then have the balls to actually wish her well with a SMILE?!

The fact that Gale's news company happened to want her to cover the story and sent her with camera and crew to do so merely made it slightly more convenient for her to get herself to Woodsboro as quickly as she could be flown across the country. She had been in the process of informing them she would be taken a leave of absence to go to Woodsboro when they informed her that actually, they already planned on sending her there. She went ahead of the crew driving the needed equipment the several days' drive; she couldn't tolerate the idea of having to put up with anyone any longer than necessary on this particular expedition, and traveling with coworkers for a task she barely even associated with work was an excruciating concept.

Once she had arrived at the airport closest to Woodsboro and picked up her arranged rental, the first place Gale drove it to was her old home with Dewey. She had been unsurprised to find the door locked, the house unoccupied and no car in the driveway. Dewey was probably working; it was midday, after all. She didn't bother to go inside. She didn't want to see any signs of another person cohabiting a place she had helped pay off, or all the pictures of them he had undoubtedly taken down. Instead she headed straight for the Woodsboro Police Department, determined to confront Dewey for the first time in nearly two years. To hell with how embarrassing it would be for her or for him. After everything he had pulled, he deserved it. She almost looked forward to it.

Except that intention of confronting Dewey at the police station didn't quite end as she expected. Dewey was neither there, nor out on a call. In fact, as she was informed by some rookie cop she neither recognized nor bothered to get the name of, with a baffled pity that Gale greatly resented, Dewey no longer worked for the police department at all. Hadn't, in fact, for well over a year.

Gale's brain had almost exploded at that bit of information. If Dewey wasn't working as the sheriff any longer, what exactly was he doing? Was he living with Judy Hicks now, or someone else?

All information she demanded from the poor rookie, who tried to maintain that it was private information that he didn't have the authority to release. Gale, being used to this sort of pushback, merely informed anyone within hearing vicinity that she was the ex-sheriff's wife, the face of a national morning show, and that Mr. Riley was determined to be a future target of the active murderer/s, along with herself. Their failure to provide for his safety, should anything happen to him, would be publicly blasted online and onscreen and she would personally sue for his death with money that could buy over their entire department. She must have been as intimidating as she intended to be, because the much younger man got a coworker who had the information she needed and provided her with it: an address. One that didn't make the least bit of sense to Gale, because it was to a trailer park. What would Dewey be doing there? Was that where his new woman lived? Could that seriously be the kind of life he had chosen? For Gale, who had lived her first seventeen and a half years in a very similar trailer park with her frequently drunk mother and her mother's paramours, this was like a slap in the face and twisted de ja vu in one.

She had worked herself into such a state of anger by the time she pulled into the scrappy circle of the trailer park's buildings that she barely even noted the fact that only one vehicle was parked outside of Dewey's apparent location rather than two. Almost tripping up the weathered stairs, she hammered on the worn door with two fists, her body taut with barely contained rage.

"Dewey! Dewey Riley, open the door, NOW!"

The day started as it has ever since September 1996 - with horrible pain firing up his back that progressively got worse as the years passed after each subsequent Ghostface attack. The difference between now and the time before almost two years ago was that he had someone to ask to rub at the sore patches lining his back as he waited for the pain medication to set it. Now that he wakes up every morning to cold air blowing on his back, provided by his cheap AC unit, he's taken to doubling his intake with a little help from liquid courage to hasten the effects, however it seems more like a subsidiary to the main reason he can't go a day without passing out drunk after a tearful bout of self-loathing. The real reason was for his wife Gale - or ex-wife, he was too scared to check if she had filed for a divorce after he left in the dead of night, the love of his life sleeping soundly in bed and none the wiser.

He knew what he was doing was awful and that he deserved to be crowned the worst husband in the world, but he was more afraid of what staying could mean for Gale's career. Doing nothing all day in a high-rise penthouse surely must've caused her some frustration, to have a husband who sits on his ass and complains about his back all the time, and if she didn't, Dewey knew that he didn't like it. New York was too different. He hated how it smelled of trash and smog compared to Woodsboro's clear and flowery. He hated that it almost always looked cloudy rather than sunny, like back home. And he hated most of all the feeling of being useless. He put policing on hold so that Gale could have her turn, the height of her career, but it left him without a purpose. For over twenty years, he's dedicated his life to defending the defenseless from the everyday crook to the psychos who dressed up in Halloween costumes with a ghost mask, and stopping it all so suddenly was, to say the least, a whiplash.

He remembers when he joined the force, outwardly looking to garner respect from the peers who mocked him and called him Dewey, but deep down, he wanted to become an officer to protect the innocent - people who had friends, wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, children, everything from top to bottom because nobody deserved to be scared of what was outside when they could be experiencing life to its fullest. His ideology only became stronger after he was sweeping the empty home on 261 Turner Lane and found his sister, Tatum, stuck halfway through a cat door with a snapped neck and blood dripping from a long, fresh wound on her arm, hung into the air with the power of a garage door. Each and every day Dewey tells himself that he should've been at the house, not galivanting with his boyish crush from Channel 4's Top Story; he regrets nothing about his relationship with Gale, but if he could turn back time to that very moment, he'd do it with no hesitation, then maybe Tatum would still be alive.

What almost broke him more was the look of grief his mother pulled when she was told the fate of her youngest child, who had barely near reached eighteen; her cries and tears forever haunt him to this day. Dewey vowed that nobody should have to go through that pain and fought tooth-and-nail every time a new teenage bastard dawned the Ghostface outfit, to stop them from hurting more people than they already have. So to be uprooted from that world and sent off across the country left him paranoid for people's safety; to hell with the nine stab wounds in his back, he'll take a dozen more if he could prevent the taxing loss on the mind of victims' families.

It took several nights of deep thought and waterfalls of tears to tell himself that it would be better for him to leave New York behind and return to the small town of Woodsboro. It was a stupid, mind-numbing idea, to leave in the middle of the night as his wife slept, but he couldn't think of anything else; he couldn't burden Gale with his woes, not now that she's hot news and has her face plastered over every billboard you found when turning the corner. When the night arrived, each footstep felt like there were shackles around his ankles attempting to hold him in the apartment, and, several times, he almost turned back around to tuck under the covers and hold his wife, but he committed when he realized that he was too far in to back out without Gale catching wind of his plan. So, with a suitcase of clothes, Tatum's ashes, and photos of him and Gale, he walked out the door and didn't look back.

When he landed in Woodsboro, he felt home for the first time in years. The smells, the sights, the people - all was just right. The WPD welcomed him back with open arms as their Sheriff and he went right back to doing what he did best. Days passed and his phone was constantly blown up with messages from his angered then sad wife, who had no idea if he was even alive. It was about his toughest days alive to not pick up the phone and message back, but he knew it would only send her out looking for him, and the faster she accepted he was gone, the better. It was a horrible thought, one that plagued his conscience every second of every day, but he continued to tell himself it was what was best for the both of them.

It was about two months in did he realize that he missed her - or missed her more than he thought he ever could. With his and Gale's old home still in their name, he could not return from a hard day at work and be greeted with her voice, her touch, her eyes - by God, her eyes. He could never sit on the couch with her head resting on his lap until she started to drool on his pant leg. He could never touch her, hug her, or kiss her again. The wave of realization hit like a tsunami, and no medication was going to take away that feeling, so he looked for other means.

In the months to follow, there wasn't a day when he went into work hungover from a previous night binge session. He could barely comprehend words on documents anymore and reports went in one ear and out the other. It all came to a head when he was called in late one night and he arrived to the shocked faces of his Deputies and Officers as they watched their Sheriff wobble on his feet and slur his words, eyes red and cheeks stained with tears. Embarrassment hung damp in the air the next day in the bullpen and it all turned to heart-pounding anxiety when representatives of Woodsboro stomped their way into Dewey's office.

It was one thing when he was brain-dead at the department, but it was a whole other topic when the town's Sheriff arrived at a crime scene plastered, and Woodsboro's representatives, with word from the Mayor, called for his resignation immediately. The pitying looks from his now former Officers set the ex-Sheriff's mind ablaze as he walked out of the department. When he returned home, he felt more lonely than he ever had before. With his once prim and proper outfit ruffled and dirty at its hems, Dewey raided the cabinets for every bottle of beer, whiskey, and vodka and drank until his body pulled him into a deep sleep.

Nothing got better. Even though his pension was enough to pay off his house, Dewey couldn't handle its emptiness and felt someone like him wasn't deserving of the lavish suburban home that he once shared with Gale. He took all he could carry and abandoned the home, opting for a cramped trailer van instead - then everything wouldn't feel so empty. The place was always invested with bugs crawling through the screen window and he had a raccoon that rummaged through his trash outside every night, but the former Sheriff could care less; for all he cared, the raccoon could eat him.

He never bothered to go out often, only when he needed more booze and something to eat for the next week. His neighbors were noisy, and he's seen one too many times what a man looks like when high on crack and LSD; he'd call the police to bust them, but all fucks were lost the day he walked out that door back in New York. God, what a mistake he made.

He left the one person who cared enough to love him, a love unlike him and Sidney's sibling-esque love, all so he could be the hero, and now the job he desperately craved to have once more was ripped from him, meaning the stupor he has put himself in and the heartbreak he put his wife through was for nothing. If he had half the balls of a real man, he would've just stuck it out and poured his heart out to her, but he was a coward and ran with his tail tucked between his legs.

Pulling himself out of bed took almost an hour, but when the pain began stabbing him in the back, he knew he needed to leave his depressing room and go to his depressing bathroom for his medication. Lumbering down the hall, not aided by a pounding headache, Dewey weakly opened the cabinet hung over his sink and grabbed the rum-colored orange bottle, twisting the top off and swallowing his pill dry before taking another one for good measure - to hell with what his doctor says.

It was brighter in the living room, but only because his drunken self forgot to close the drapes. The fridge was near empty besides a lump of what appeared to be bread, or maybe it was a potato? He doesn't care, it's something to eat. Or not, as he couldn't help but spit the foreign food from his mouth at its foul taste - definitely spoiled, but it's nothing a cup of coffee couldn't fix. The brew was a day old and cold now, but he'd take it, plus he always added a little vodka anyways.

The couch was rough and he could feel the springs rubbing through the cushions, but he wasn't going to go out and get a new one. With the click of a button, his TV spurred to life and there he saw Gale Weathers on her newest report. Just as he had since he was in his early twenties, Dewey couldn't help but watch Gale, not for anything she was discussing about, but just to watch her and see that, without him, she's successful. His lips subconsciously turned up into a smile hearing her voice and seeing her stark blue eyes.

All was ruined though as a pounding knock erupted onto his door. The voice on the other side was unknown to him, and he already had enough reporters trying to get him to talk to them, and none of them succeeded - but this wasn't a reporter. It was a woman, one who was requesting his help. He was still hesitant, but then a bombshell was dropped - this woman was the daughter of Billy Loomis. How the little bastard bore a child, he couldn't figure out, but it was enough for him to allow her and some guy into his home, but only for a little bit.

The guy set the ex-Sheriff off - there was something about him. The way he stared for too long and the way he fidgeted with his fingers. Turns out he's mystery Loomis baby's boyfriend, and Dewey's suspicion rose. If this woman's father is anything to go by, the love interest is never to be trusted. But, this wasn't his fight anymore. He was in no position to go gung-ho on freaky ghost-masked killers anymore, and being fifty definitely didn't help his case.

The woman, Samantha, pleaded with him to help, but all he allowed was some wisdom and his door to her and Mr. McDreamy's face. He returned to the TV again and was reminded that he wasn't the only one who Samantha might reach out to once he saw Gale's face again. It had been some time, but he contacted Sidney, who was more than willing to stay out of Woodsboro, especially now with her children.

"Do you have a gun?"

"I'm Sidney fucking Prescott, of course I have a gun," she said matter-of-factly. It was so…Sidney, he thought. There wasn't one person in the world he could doubt had a weapon. His chuckle was involuntary, but he welcomed it - it was the first he had in a long time. He tried not to choke up on the memories it brought back of his teenage self tasked with babysitting a young Sidney and Tatum - the trouble the two caused annoyed him then, but he found it amusing now, even if it was only so he could experience it again. They bid their goodbyes and he was prepared to make his next call to…Gale.

He couldn't. She'd never pick up. He'd send her a text - he knew she'd see it and she didn't have to respond if she didn't want to, perfect! He told her straight, "Ghostface is back. Don't come to Woodsboro," and intended to leave it off there, but Dewey, being…Dewey, just had to say something so awkward that it could be felt through the phone. "Hope all is well :)"

He wanted to type more, but he couldn't say it, one because things were already getting awkward, and two, who's to say that she does back? He wouldn't blame her, that's for sure. He set his phone down and heaved in a heavy sigh. He began to ponder on what Sidney told him - "Whoever this killer's after, I'm glad they have you to protect them."

It hit him all at once. He couldn't sit back and let these people, these kids, deal with it all on their own. If there was any meaning to leaving Gale, sinking into a depression, and becoming the local drunk, this was it. He looked to Tatum's box and welled up; this is what it's all for, so nobody had to experience the same grief. Like a cowboy out of the old westerns he used to watch as a boy, Dewey cleaned himself up - if he was going to look like a drunk, the least he could do was not smell like one - and rounded up his revolver; six in the chamber.

With his weapon holstered and coat on his shoulders, Dewey grabbed his keys and limped towards the door, but all came to a halt when someone pounded on it again, but this person he knew. He knew them all too well.

"Dewey! Dewey Riley, open the door, now!"

His heart pounded inside of his chest, however it felt it could've burst at any moment. His knees felt weak, weaker than they already were. A part of him was happy to hear her voice in person, but the larger part was terrified, not only because Gale was in Woodsboro, but because it sounded like she was gonna rip his head off. He refused to move or make a sound. Maybe she'd go away if he acted like he wasn't here.