Colin held his tablet at his side. He had not opened the security application yet. He wanted Miriam to see the yard first, to see the facts on the ground before anyone told her what those facts meant. Dana lifted the red folder and held it out like a weapon.
"This is an emergency water-shutoff demand," she said. "Sign it, turn off every exterior line, and cooperate with the property review."
"What property review?" Colin asked.
"The HOA needs to determine whether the house remains safe," Dana said.
Leonard Shaw cleared his throat and stepped forward, his camera hanging from a strap around his neck. "Water has entered the foundation area," he said. "The board may need to require professional remediation."
"I shut the system off within minutes," Colin said.
Dana did not miss a beat. "Minutes were enough."
Colin looked at her then, really looked at her, and something cold settled in his chest. "You know exactly how long it ran."
"What is that supposed to mean?" Dana asked, her voice rising.
"You broke it," Colin said.
Cheryl Boone spoke up from behind Dana, her arms crossed tight over her chest. "Dana was with us when the complaint was filed."
"That was after she left my yard," Colin said.
Dana laughed, a short, sharp sound that carried no warmth at all. "You're blaming me because your illegal system failed."
Colin did not argue. He had learned something in the months of complaints and inspections and anonymous letters. Arguing with Dana in front of an audience only gave her more material. She wanted a scene. She wanted him loud and defensive while she stayed calm and official. He would not give her that. Instead he stood quietly and let Miriam do her job.
Miriam walked past Dana quietly without answering her and crouched beside the broken sprinkler head. She took photographs with a small camera, moving slowly and carefully around the crater. She photographed the shattered housing, the pieces of white plastic scattered in the mud. She photographed the exposed pipe where it had split beneath the head. She leaned close and photographed the marks in the plastic, the dents and gouges that no water pressure could have made on its own. Then she stood and measured the distance from the head to the property line with a tape, calling out the number to herself as she wrote it in a notebook.
Behind her, Dana kept talking. "The pressure has been unstable for months," she said. "His system pulls too much water. Several homes have noticed it."
Colin listened to that claim and felt a familiar anger rise and settle. The pressure complaints had begun before his new system was even installed. He knew that because he had kept the dates. The installer had certified the system twice, once after the upgrade three weeks earlier and once after the first complaint, and both times the paperwork had come back clean. The city had measured his spray and found it stayed inside his property. A drainage specialist had found no evidence that his landscaping pushed water toward Dana's driveway. Every complaint had failed on its own facts, and every failure had been followed by a new complaint phrased slightly differently, as though repetition could do what evidence could not.
He thought about the two neighbors who had accused his sprinkler system of reducing their water pressure. They were good people, as far as he knew, but they had filed their complaints after Dana spoke to them, and they had described the problem in her words, using her phrases about high-efficiency systems and stolen pressure. Colin had never blamed them for it. Dana had a way of sounding certain, and certainty was persuasive when you did not have the technical knowledge to check it. But standing in his muddy yard, listening to her make the same claim to a city inspector, he felt the weight of all those months press down on him at once: the packages that disappeared from his porch, the anonymous HOA complaints about garbage cans and fence stain and a garage light, the screws loosened on his side gate, the load of gravel that arrived with an invoice carrying his name. Each incident alone had seemed small, almost petty. Together they formed a pattern, and the pattern had a direction. It pointed at his house, at his land, at the side yard the developer wanted for an entrance.