He put one copy in each of thirty-seven envelopes. He addressed them by villa number, not by name, because he did not want a misspelled name to become the story, and because he did not yet know every family by name. On a Tuesday morning, with the light flat over the basin, he walked the curving streets he had photographed on his first day back and slid an envelope into each mailbox and under each storm door where there was no box. He did not linger at any house, and he did not ring a bell. At the first villa, Priya Okafor was in the open garage again, this time sorting books onto a shelf, and Maya's bicycle leaned against the wall beside a box marked with a child's handwriting. Tom nodded to Priya as he passed. She watched him put the envelope in the box, and he saw her glance at the return address before she picked it up. He kept walking, past the sod that was still new enough to show its seams, past the black streetlights that followed the old shoreline, past the pool lot where a crew had once carried patio furniture toward water that had not yet returned.
By noon he had finished. He drove to the county seat and gave Alice a signed copy and a list of the villa numbers, with the time of delivery noted beside each one, and she filed the list with her own copy of the letter. That evening, Daniel Okafor called Alice's office. He did not shout. He asked whether the deed number was real, whether the order number was real, and whether Tom expected his family to move. Alice answered the first two questions yes and the third with care: not yet, and not on Tom's word alone, but the documents were public and the court would decide. Daniel thanked her and hung up. Tom, sitting across from Alice's desk, said nothing for a while after the call ended. He had delivered the letter because leaving the families to learn about the refill from damp floors would have been worse. That did not make the delivery feel clean, and he knew the next weeks would test whether plain facts, delivered plainly, were enough.
The town hall was held in the county building, not in the Cove, because Alice had insisted that no one should have to defend their home in a room owned by the association. The meeting room held perhaps eighty chairs, and most of them filled before the posted start time. Sheriff Mark Hollis stood near the door in uniform, not at the front of the room, and he said at the start that he was there to keep order and to answer questions about process, not to take a side on title. Tom sat at a side table with Alice, his papers in a folder he did not open. Monica sat in the second row with two board members, her pink suit replaced by a dark jacket, her folder closed on her lap, her expression composed in the way it always was when she wanted a room to remember her as reasonable.
Tom spoke first, and briefly. He read the same facts from the letter, in the same order, without adding adjectives. He named the deed, the order, and the refill date. He said the water authority, not he, operated the dam, and that he had no authority to open or close a gate and had never sought any. He said the pool sat over the old creek channel and would likely show seepage first, which was why he had written early rather than waiting for proof no one needed. He said he understood that the families had bought in good faith, and that his claim was against the developer and the association, not against them. Then he sat down, and Alice explained, in plain language, what a declaratory judgment was and what an injunction would and would not do.