The new binder was thicker than the first one within a week. Preston filed a quiet title action and served the Cedar Ridge HOA with a notice of trespass, along with a demand that they cease renting a structure that sat, in its entirety, on Aldridge land. I did not shout. I did not confront the HOA president at the gate. I simply let the paperwork do what paperwork does when it’s real and theirs is fiction. My 1965 survey, stamped and recorded, put the cabin a full ninety feet inside my boundary. Their plat, drawn by a deputy surveyor who’d never set foot on the property, put it just barely on their side. One of those documents was going to survive a courtroom, and it wasn’t theirs.

The HOA president, a man named Halloran who had made his money in resort development, finally came to see me. He arrived in a spotless truck, shook my hand like we were old friends, and offered me exactly what I expected: a check, “for the inconvenience,” and a easement agreement that would let the lodge stay right where it was. He slid the paper across my kitchen table with a smile. “I think you’ll find this more than generous for a man in your position,” he said. That was his mistake, those five words, a man in your position. I let the silence sit. Then I opened the new binder and turned it to face him.