Sheriff Hollis served the papers that afternoon. He served Grant Harrington at the development office, where Grant read the first page standing at his desk and said nothing to the sheriff beyond an acknowledgment. He served Monica at the association office, where she accepted the papers with the same composure she had shown at the town hall and thanked him politely. He served the county planning office at its front desk, where a clerk stamped the copy and filed it without comment. The sheriff logged each service by time and place, as he always did, and gave Alice the returns the same day. That evening, Tom walked the ridge above the basin and looked down at the villas, their lights coming on in the flat light, smoke rising from a few chimneys, a bicycle still leaning by a garage. He did not feel victorious. He felt as if he had finally put the argument where it belonged, in a room with a judge and a record, instead of in letters that could be answered with other letters. Alice called again that night, not with news but with procedure: the respondents would have a set time to answer, the court would set a hearing for the injunction, and Tom should expect the association's counsel to argue that a halt to sales would harm residents more than it helped them. Tom listened and said he understood the argument, and that he also understood the other side of it, which was that a sale made after notice was harder to unwind than a sale stopped before it closed. Alice said that was exactly the point she would make, and that she would make it with the petition, not with rhetoric. Tom thanked her and set the notebook down, the case number written beside his father's gauge readings, two kinds of record on the same page.
June Park found the filing herself. She did that most mornings, as a habit: she walked to the county clerk's office with a notebook, asked for the new civil filings, and read them at the counter before anyone had a chance to summarize them for her. She was the county Gazette's reporter for planning and courts, and she had covered enough plat disputes to know the difference between a boundary argument and a case that would rearrange a neighbourhood. This one, she saw at once, was the second kind, because it did not argue about a fence line. It argued about whether thirty-seven houses stood on land their builder had ever owned.
She read the petition in full, then asked the clerk for the attachments. She copied the deed citation, Book 512, Page 204, and the order number, 2026-14, into her notebook in her own hand, and she underlined the refill date. She called Alice Moreno, who confirmed the filing and declined to characterize it beyond what the petition said, which June respected and noted. She called the association's counsel, who said the association disputed the claim and would respond in court. She called Harrington Peak Development, where a staff member said Grant Harrington was unavailable, and she wrote down the time of that call. She drove to the Cove in the afternoon and stood where Tom had stood on his first day back, looking at the villas, the sod, and the streetlights following the old shoreline. She did not knock on doors either. She photographed the pool from the street and the dam between the ridges, and she went back to the office to check the operating schedule against the water authority's public file, because a reporter who printed a date should have seen it in the authority's own record, not only in a petition.