The pressure became less subtle. Someone loosened the screws on his side gate, so that it hung crooked and rattled in the wind until Colin found the problem and fixed it himself. A load of gravel appeared near his driveway one morning with an invoice carrying his name, an order he had never placed, and when he called the company they told him the order had come from a woman who had given his address and his name with complete confidence. Two neighbors accused his sprinkler system of reducing their water pressure, though the complaints began before the new system was even installed, a detail that should have ended the argument on its own and somehow did not. Each incident was small. Each one could be explained away, or denied, or shrugged off. Together they formed a pattern that Colin could feel even before he could prove it, a steady, deliberate effort to make his home feel less like a home and more like a problem he should solve by leaving.
He had kept every letter, every notice, every report, because some instinct had told him early on that he would need them. The folder in his study held the drainage specialist's findings, the city's spray measurements, and the installer's two certifications, each one stamped and dated, each one contradicting a complaint Dana had made with complete confidence. He had also kept his own notes, short entries in a plain notebook, recording the date of each inspection, the name of each inspector, and what Dana had said while standing at the edge of her property, smiling. He had not known, when he started that notebook, what it would become. He had only known that a man who answered complaints one at a time, politely and in good faith, could still lose if no one ever laid the complaints side by side and saw them for what they were. The notebook was his way of laying them side by side. On the morning of the flood, as he stood in the mud with the security video on his phone, he thought about that folder and that notebook, and he understood that they were no longer just records of annoyances. They were the beginning of a case, and Dana had just handed him its most important piece, in high definition, with a timestamp.
The inspections themselves had been the worst part, worse than the missing packages and the gravel and the gate screws, because they brought strangers into his yard with clipboards and made his home feel like a property under review. Dana had always been there, just outside the fence line, watching, and Colin had learned to read her presence as a signal: wherever she stood, smiling, an official-looking process was about to treat him as the problem. He had answered every question, shown every certificate, and walked every inspector through the side yard himself, because he believed that openness was the best defense. Now he wondered whether openness had been enough, or whether Dana had counted on it, counting on the fact that a man who cooperated fully would still look like a man with something to explain if enough people arrived with enough paperwork. The thought made him tired in a way the shovel work did not, a tiredness that sat behind his eyes and made the morning feel longer than it was.
Then Dana arrived with an easement agreement, and the pressure stopped pretending to be anything else. The document granted Stonehaven contractors permission to enter the side yard for what it called "temporary utility evaluation," but the permission had no expiration date, which meant it was not temporary in any meaningful sense. It could be transferred to future companies, which meant Colin would not even know who held the right to walk his yard in five years or ten. One clause allowed excavation. Another waived claims for property damage, which meant that if the contractors tore up his lawn or cracked his foundation, he would have already agreed not to complain about it. Colin read every page, twice, and refused to sign. Dana stood across his porch from him, holding the unsigned agreement, and said, "You will sell eventually." Colin said, "No." She smiled the same small smile he would later see on the security video, and said, "Everybody says no until staying becomes more expensive."