After Alice left, I did what she had advised and what my Army training had taught me years before, which was to secure the evidence before I did anything else with it. I photographed every page of the duplicate minutes on the kitchen table, making sure the dates were legible and the whole page was in frame, and then I photographed them again on a different background in case the first set was questioned. I made a second set of photographs with my phone and a third with Amara's old tablet that we kept in a drawer, because I did not want a single lost phone to mean a lost case, and I put the original copies Alice had left with me in a sealed envelope inside a locked box in my bedroom closet, behind the winter coats where no casual visitor would look. I wrote down, in the same legal pad where I had recorded the letters, the date Alice had visited and what she had shown me, in plain language without exaggeration, just the facts as she had laid them out, and I noted that the rule had been backdated to 14 March. I did not sleep well that night. I lay awake listening to the house settle and thinking about Sandra Whitaker and what kind of person backdates a rule to fine a neighbour, and thinking about Amara asleep down the hall and what kind of father I needed to be for her in this. I had always tried to teach her that you stand up when something is wrong, but you stand up smart, with your papers in order and your temper under control, and now I was going to have to live that lesson in front of her in real time, not just talk about it at the dinner table.
The next day the fines kept coming, or rather the threat of them kept coming, because the letters did not arrive every single day but the daily fine kept accruing in the background like a meter running while I went to work and came home and lived my life. I checked the mailbox each evening with a knot in my stomach, half expecting another envelope, and when there was not one, I still felt the weight of the five hundred dollars a day hanging over the driveway. I started keeping a daily log, a simple line for each day with the date and a note that the car remained parked in my driveway and that no new lawful notice had been served, and I photographed the car in the driveway each morning before I left for the warehouse, with the house number visible and the time stamp on the photograph. Amara noticed, of course, and she asked me why I was taking pictures of the car every morning, and I told her I was keeping records, the same way I kept records at the warehouse, because when people disagree about what happened, records are what settle it. It was Elena Ruiz who first said out loud what I had been thinking in private. Elena lived a few doors down, forty-eight and direct in the way that made you trust her immediately, and she stopped me one Saturday morning while I was washing the BMW in the driveway, bucket and sponge in hand, Amara on the porch with a book. Elena did not pretend she was just passing by. She walked up the driveway, looked at the car, looked at me, and asked if Sandra had been bothering me again, and when I said she had, Elena shook her head and said the whole lane had noticed. She said she had seen Sandra standing by my mailbox more than once, clipboard in hand, and she had seen the notes on my windshield, and she thought it was wrong for a neighbour to be treated like a problem for parking his own car at his own house. I told her about the fines, about the first fine of two hundred dollars and then the increase to five hundred dollars a day, and I watched her face change as the numbers landed, because Elena knew what that kind of money meant to a single father working a warehouse job and raising a teenage daughter on his own. She told me she would stand with me if it came to that, not in a dramatic way, but in the practical way neighbours do, by watching, by remembering, by being willing to say what they saw if anyone ever asked. I thanked her, and I meant it.