Chapter 6 - THE FENCE, THE HEDGE, AND THE MISSING STAKES
The survey results came back the next morning.
Katherine’s decorative hedge crossed the line by nearly four feet.
Her stone path crossed it by almost three.
The white pergola she called her “peace pavilion” sat directly inside the recorded drainage easement.
And the back corner of the screened sunroom Ted added last year without ever mentioning permits?
That was the worst part.
It encroached over the line and into protected access area.
Bill the surveyor also found evidence that old boundary stakes had been removed and replaced with landscaping stones sometime within the last two years.
When he said that, I remembered something suddenly.
A spring afternoon the year before, Katherine had stood at the fence complaining that Mark’s old wooden marker “looked ugly” beside her hydrangeas.
Two weeks later, it was gone.
At the time, I thought maybe weather had knocked it loose.
It hadn’t.
Nicole filed two things that day:
A civil claim for property destruction and trespass.
And a request with the county planning office for inspection of all structures affecting the drainage easement.
That second filing hit Katherine harder than the first.
Because money is one thing. Pride is another.
And Katherine’s real pride was not her house.
It was the backyard she showed off to every guest, every delivery person, every neighborhood barbecue invitee she ever hosted.
The “peace garden.”
The “retreat.”
The sanctuary she had built while criticizing everything around her.
By afternoon, she was outside pacing while two county inspectors photographed her pergola, measuring tape in hand.
When she saw me watching from my porch, she shouted, “You’re petty!”
“No,” I said. “I’m prepared.”
She stared at me for a long second as if seeing me properly for the first time.
Not as the too-tired widow with too many children.
May you like
Not as the easy neighbor.
But as someone she had hit too hard — and missed.
