There were harder days, too, and I will not pretend otherwise. Sandra sent a letter to every household, printed on association letterhead, warning that the recall was divisive and that the audit was incomplete, and she used language that stopped just short of accusing Alice of forgery, which was a careful choice on her part, because an outright accusation could be tested and a suggestion could not. Frank sent a separate note claiming that the towing invoices had been misunderstood, and that the gate reserve had been moved for legitimate reasons that would be explained at the proper time, and the proper time, as always, kept receding into the future. A few neighbours who had been friendly to me in the street grew cooler, and one man I had nodded to for years stopped nodding, and I felt that small loss more than I expected to, because it reminded me that a neighbourhood is not an abstraction. It is people, and people get tired, and people get scared, and people sometimes choose the familiar wrong over the unfamiliar right because the familiar wrong at least lets them sleep at night. Elena told me not to take it personally, and Kevin told me the count was still moving in the right direction, and Harold Parker told me, with the bluntness of a man who has buried friends and kept farming through droughts, that you do not measure a harvest while it is still in the field. I kept my head down, I kept my file in order, and I kept driving Amara to school and going to work, and I let the campaign do what campaigns are supposed to do, which is to give people time to decide for themselves.
Detective Brian Hayes called me during that period, not to ask me to do anything for the recall, but to keep the criminal side of the case separate from it, and I appreciated the clarity of that boundary. He said the investigation was continuing, that the audit findings were being reviewed alongside the towing records and the minutes, and that he would contact me when he needed a formal statement rather than a conversation. I gave him what he asked for, no more and no less, and I did not pass on to the recall group anything he told me in confidence, because Alice had been equally clear that the recall had to stand on its own record, not on whispers from an investigation. Rebecca Hart was the bridge between those two worlds in the only proper sense, which was that she advised me on both, but she kept them distinct, and she warned me, more than once, that anything I said publicly could be quoted back to me later, in a meeting or in a courtroom, and that I should say only what I could prove and prove only what I had in writing. I took that advice seriously. I had spent months learning what it cost to have your words twisted, and I was not going to hand anyone a fresh opportunity to twist them again.
The petition reached its threshold sooner than any of us had expected, and Alice announced the recall meeting with the same calm she had brought to the first gathering, posting the notice in the clubhouse and delivering it to every household as the bylaws required. The meeting was set for a Saturday morning, and the clubhouse filled early, and this time the clusters of people were larger and the hum was steadier, and there were faces I had not seen at the first meeting, people who had been waiting to see whether the petition was real before they committed themselves to a room. Kevin Brooks managed the sign-in table with two volunteers I had not met before, and Harold and June Parker sat near the front, and Elena Ruiz sat beside Alice, and I sat a few rows back with my hands folded, trying to look like a neighbour rather than a plaintiff, which was, in the end, what I was. Sandra arrived with Frank Delgado, and she sat at the front table where the president always sat, and she looked composed, and I gave her that, because composure under pressure is not nothing, even when the pressure is of your own making. She spoke first, and she spoke well, and she said the association had faced difficult decisions, that mistakes had been made in record-keeping, that she had acted in what she believed were the best interests of the community, and that a recall would destabilise the neighbourhood at a time when it needed stability. It was a good speech, in the way that a speech can be good without being true, and I listened to it without interrupting, because I had promised Alice and Rebecca and myself that I would not become the man shouting in a meeting, no matter how much I wanted to.