“We gave you twenty-one days,” I said.
Laurel arrived minutes later, pale and furious, one hand pressed to her mouth as if she had discovered vandalism instead of enforcement. She stared at the dock sections stacked on a trailer.
“This is vindictive,” she said.
“No,” I replied. “This is restoration.”
“You’re destroying something beautiful.”
“You built it in the wrong place.”
Brent’s face flushed. “We were going to appeal.”
Ruth Ann had prepared me for that. “You didn’t file one.”
“We intended to.”
“Intentions don’t stay a court order.”
He looked toward Curtis’s machines, then back at me. “This could have benefited both of us.”
“You never asked me.”
That sentence stopped him longer than I expected.
Because that was the whole matter in its simplest form. Before lawyers, before surveys, before court orders, before bulldozers, before money, before pride—he had never asked. He had treated my land as an obstacle to his vision, not a neighbor’s inheritance.
Curtis and his crew worked for three days.
By the end of the first, most of the water was gone. By the end of the second, the basin had been filled in layers with soil hauled and pushed back into place. By the end of the third, the slope had been roughly restored to match its natural contour. It looked raw, wounded, and ugly, but honest. The spring ran again in its old channel, thin at first, cloudy with silt, then clearer as the disturbed mud settled.
When the last machine shut down, the silence felt heavier than the engine noise had.
Brent stood beside his truck, staring at the flattened earth.
“You’ll regret this,” he said.
