"The county's calling an emergency public meeting Monday night, high school gym. The county engineer, the county attorney, and the HOA board are required to attend. Karen sees it as her stage."
"And you?"
"I see it as the courtroom."
She was quiet a moment. "Dad, iron the suit."
"I am." I hung up.
Around 7:00 p.m. Sunday, Diane Park drove up my driveway by herself and rang the doorbell. She didn't come inside; she handed me a thick manila envelope on the porch.
"Meeting minutes: September of last year, plus the four meetings since where Karen's mentioned your dam or your parcel by name, including the one where she used the phrase 'eyesore on our community view corridor' three times."
"Diane—"
"I should have done this two years ago." She left.
Twenty minutes later, Mrs. Alvarez came up the driveway with a thermos of soup. She set it on the porch table and squeezed my hand.
"You knocked on my door first," she said, "on Thursday, before you knocked on anybody else's. I just wanted you to know I noticed." She went home.
Forty minutes after that, Frank Devereaux pulled up with a flash drive: the drone footage, all of it—six angles, time-stamped. "My grandson cleaned it up and exported it to a format the county engineer's office uses. He says hello."
"Tell him hello back."
Frank smiled briefly and went home.
I sat on the porch a long time after they left. Then I went inside and ironed the only suit I owned: the gray one I'd worn at my retirement ceremony at the county water resources office eight years earlier. I hung it on the back of the bedroom door.
On the dresser, in front of the suit, I laid out in a neat row the documents I would carry into that gym Monday night: the 1998 plat, the return receipt, the courtesy reclassification letter, Diane's minutes, Frank's drainage letter, and the board's dismissive reply; the shoebox inventory of Mrs. Alvarez's fines; the dashcam; the flash drive. And underneath all of it, rolled in its long cardboard tube, the original state permit from the spring of 2017.
I didn't unroll it. I already knew whose name was on the bottom.