Two days before the annual meeting, I got a visitor. Floyd Tench knocked on my door around 7:00 in the evening. Floyd was a retired accountant who had served on the HOA board for three years: soft-spoken, decent, I always thought. He stood on the porch holding a manila envelope and wearing the expression of a man executing an errand he had not fully endorsed.
He explained that the board had authorized him to present a settlement offer:
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All three violation notices against our family would be formally rescinded.
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Our HOA dues would be reduced by 50% for the remainder of our residency.
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We would receive a written letter of apology.
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In exchange: withdraw the HUD complaint, take no further action.
I looked at the envelope. I did not take it. I said, "Floyd, this isn't about us anymore."
Floyd drove away still holding the envelope. He looked like a man who was beginning to develop serious concerns about the recent decisions that had led him to this porch.
I called Petra immediately. She advised that a settlement offer made on behalf of the board using HOA resources to induce the withdrawal of a federal complaint might itself constitute an improper use of association funds, and, depending on how it was framed, a potential attempt to obstruct a federal process. I documented the conversation in detail: time, content, Floyd's exact words as best I could recall them. It went into the folder labeled Croft. The folder was getting thick.
The morning before the meeting, I was in the kitchen making coffee when Rosalind called me to the front window. Wren was outside. She had the chalk; she'd been adding to the mural all summer. The caterpillar named Brave had accumulated seventeen friends by this point, and the artwork stretched the full length of our front walk and curled partway onto Corrine's driveway. Nobody had complained; Corrine's son mowed around it carefully every week.
That morning, Wren was adding something new. We watched her work from the window: she was writing in that careful, wobbly script of hers next to the original caterpillar. She wrote: "For Dad."