The deposition took place in a conference room with no windows and a water cooler that gurgled like it was drowning. Meredith Sloane arrived eleven minutes late with her own attorney, a man named Porter Hale who wore a tie the color of old money and smiled at everyone the way undertakers smile at funerals. Priya had warned us that depositions were theater performed for an audience of one, the judge who would never watch them, and that our job was to make a record so clean you could eat off it. I sat at the far end of the table with a notepad and said nothing, which is what witnesses who want to help are supposed to do.
Priya began with the fines. She read the violation letters one at a time, slowly, like she was reading bedtime stories to a child who hated bedtime, and asked Meredith to identify the section of the covenants authorizing each one. The first was the satellite dish fine under Section 9.4. The second was the garden-bed fine under Section 12.1. The third was the porch-furniture fine under Section 7.7. There was a long silence while Porter Hale whispered something in Meredith's ear, and then Meredith said the words that would define the rest of the morning.
"The board acted within its broad discretion."
Priya asked her to point to the language granting that discretion. Meredith flipped through the binder in front of her, which I noticed was color-tabbed with an engineer's care, and said, "I don't recall the specific provision."
Priya marked it. "Let's try the assessment," she said. "The two-thousand-dollar pond restoration assessment. What did it restore?"
"The pond," Meredith said.
"What work was performed?"
"I'm not a contractor, Ms. Desai."
"Who was?"
"I don't recall."
"Was a contractor hired?"
"I don't recall."
"Was a single dollar of the two thousand spent on the pond?"
Porter Hale leaned forward. "Objection. Calls for a legal conclusion."
"You can answer," Priya said pleasantly.
"I don't recall," Meredith said.
By the lunch break, Priya's paralegal had tallied forty-one instances of "I don't recall," and Priya had them numbered in the margin of her legal pad like bird sightings. Meredith ate a salad at the table and complained that the air conditioning was too cold, and I thought about the doorbell camera clip and the way she had leaned into my doorframe that evening. Confidence, I thought, was her load-bearing wall, and Priya was taking core samples.
After lunch came the emails. Priya had the personal ones, the ones from the address Meredith used for "family business," printed on heavy paper and numbered as exhibits. She read one aloud. It was dated three weeks before the violation letters went out, and it said, "Start with the dish. Nolan's the engineer, he'll fight, and if he fights the rest will follow him. Make an example." Meredith stared at it.
"Did you write this?" Priya asked.
"I don't recall writing that."
"It's from your email address."
"Lots of people have access to my accounts."
"Name one."
Porter Hale objected. Meredith said, "I don't recall."
Then the cousin's texts. Priya read those too, in Vince Marlow's own shorthand, and Meredith's composure developed its first visible crack, a small white line at the corner of her mouth. "Crestline needs the win," Vince had written. "I'll make the number work for both of us." And Meredith, back: "Just don't put the real bid in writing."
Vince Marlow's own deposition came two days later, in the same windowless room, and it went nothing like Meredith's. Vince was a man who had built a business on handshakes and suddenly found himself in a room where handshakes were exhibits. Priya walked him through the Crestline contract line by line, the no-bid award, the $18,400 invoice for work the maintenance logs showed had never been scheduled, and asked him, gently, what the markup had been over his standard rate.
Vince looked at his own lawyer. His lawyer looked at the ceiling. Vince said, "About forty percent."
"Forty percent above your normal rate," Priya said, "on a no-bid contract, awarded by your cousin."
"It was a family rate," Vince said, and the room went very quiet, because everyone in it understood that he had meant the words to land one way and they had landed the other. His lawyer closed his eyes. Priya wrote it down without looking up.
"Family rate," she repeated. "In reverse."
The next week was Ruth's deposition, and I drove her there because her car was in the shop and because I wanted to be useful in some way that didn't involve sitting silent at the end of a table. Ruth Kim was sixty-two, retired from thirty years of school administration, and she had a memory for dates that bordered on the supernatural. Priya had told her to answer only what was asked, to volunteer nothing, to let the silence do the work. Ruth nodded like she was taking attendance.
Porter Hale tried to rattle her. He asked about the election, the 112-to-9 vote, and whether she had personally witnessed any ballot being altered. Ruth said no. He asked whether she had any proof the minutes were pre-written. Ruth said she had the email, which was already an exhibit, and the timestamps, which were already in the record. He asked whether it was possible she had misunderstood the board's procedures. Ruth looked at him over her reading glasses and said, "Mr. Hale, I ran a school district's compliance office for eleven years. I understand procedures. That is why I noticed these."
He asked her to characterize Meredith's leadership. Priya objected, and Ruth answered anyway, quietly. "She treated the association like it was hers," Ruth said. "It wasn't."
On the drive home, Ruth stared out the window at the pond, which was still green and still un-restored, and said, "I kept thinking she'd shout. She never shouts. That's the whole trick, isn't it? She never has to."
That evening Priya called me from her office. I could hear papers shuffling, the sound of a case being assembled one exhibit at a time. "She brought confidence to a document fight," Priya said. "Confidence loses document fights. Every time."