The work itself was slow and physical, and Colin was grateful for that, because it gave his mind something to do besides replay the video. He dug in short, steady strokes, clearing mud from the channel, watching the brown water find the shallow path he had cut and follow it toward the street drain. His shoes squelched with every step. His jeans clung to his legs. The air smelled of wet earth and crushed plants, and the flower beds he had tended through the spring lay flattened and silted, . He had planted some of those flowers with Alex, on a Saturday not unlike this one, and the memory of that ordinary morning, father and son kneeling in the soil, hit him harder than he expected. Dana had not just broken a piece of equipment. She had reached into the small, quiet routines that made the house feel like theirs and broken one of them in front of a camera, as if to prove she could.
He thought about those six months as he worked, because the mud under his shoes and the water against his foundation made the pattern suddenly, brutally clear. The landscaping claim had come first, delivered with concern, as if Dana were only worried about her driveway. When the drainage specialist found nothing, she had not apologized or withdrawn the claim. She had simply moved on to the roses, and when the city measured the spray and found it stayed on his side of the line, she had moved on to the pressure, and when the installer certified the system twice, she had kept going anyway, as if repetition alone could turn a failed complaint into a true one. Colin had answered each one in good faith, because that was what a reasonable neighbor did. He had shown the reports. He had produced the certificates. He had kept his voice even. And all the while, Dana had been building a file, a history of complaints that would look, to anyone who only skimmed it, like a pattern of trouble at his address rather than a pattern of one neighbor refusing to accept an answer.
The water kept coming, slower now, but still finding the low places. Colin widened the channel with the shovel, his shoulders aching, and watched the muddy stream carry bits of mulch and soil toward the street drain. The flower beds nearest the side yard were already ruined, their edges collapsed, their plants flattened and half buried. He did not yet know how much of the house had been affected. He knew the basement window well was full, and he knew the crawl space beneath the dining-room extension sat low enough to take water, and he knew the foundation insulation near the side wall would soak it up like a sponge if he did not get the flow turned away from the house. He worked with the focused, grim energy of a man who has stopped asking why something happened and started asking how much of it he can still prevent.
Alex came back outside with more towels, his pajama legs dark with mud now, and helped his father press them along the basement door. The boy did not ask any more questions for a while. He just worked, his face set, his hands busy, and Colin was grateful for that, because he did not yet have answers that would sound steady if he said them out loud. The security video was still on his phone, and he kept thinking about the way Dana had looked toward the bedroom window before she crossed the lawn. She had checked. She had wanted to know whether he was awake, whether he would come out, whether she would be seen. And then she had done it anyway, in full view of a camera she either did not know about or did not believe would matter. That detail stayed with him as he dug, because it told him something about how certain she had been. She had not hurried. She had not looked over her shoulder after the third strike. She had photographed her own handiwork and smiled and walked home, and that calm, Colin understood, was the whole point. She had wanted a scene. She had wanted mud and flooding and an official complaint, and she had wanted it all to look like his system had failed, not like she had walked into his yard with a hammer.