I grilled steaks, drank a cold beer, and made it incredibly obvious that I was enjoying my private, unauthorized water feature.
Nothing happened. The weekend passed without a single knock at the gate. I began to wonder if the visible cameras had finally scared her off.
On Tuesday afternoon, the blistering heatwave returned. The temperature soared to a suffocating one hundred and two degrees.
I was sitting in a windowless conference room in a downtown office building, forty-five minutes away from my house, enduring a mandatory corporate seminar on data security.
Right in the middle of a painfully boring PowerPoint presentation, my phone vibrated in my pocket.
I pulled it out discreetly under the table. It was a push notification from my security app: Motion Detected: Backyard Gate.
I felt a surge of adrenaline. I quietly pushed my chair back, slipped out of the conference room, and walked rapidly down the carpeted hallway to a quiet alcove.
I opened the app and tapped on the live feed for the side gate camera.
The crystal-clear 4K video loaded instantly. I fully expected to see Margaret standing there with her teenagers, demanding entry.
But she wasn't carrying pool noodles. And she wasn't wearing a swimsuit.
Margaret was standing inside my backyard, having already bypassed the locked gate. She was wearing professional business attire. Standing next to her was a tall, broad-shouldered man in a sharp gray suit.
I assumed this was Richard Vance.
They weren't looking at the water. They were standing near the back corner of my property, exactly where I had found the wooden surveyor’s stake.
I watched in absolute confusion as Richard knelt on my manicured grass. He pulled a specialized metal tube from a canvas bag, drove it deep into the soil with a rubber mallet, and pulled up a core sample of dirt. He tapped the dirt into a plastic bag.
Margaret stood beside him, holding the heavy leather clipboard, pointing toward my house and talking rapidly.
I turned up the volume on my phone, straining to hear the audio feed.
"...needs to be leveled completely," Richard was saying, his voice distorted slightly by the wind hitting the camera microphone. "The water table here is perfect for the foundation."
"He refuses to acknowledge the notices," Margaret replied. "We have to escalate the timeline."
My blood ran completely cold. They weren't trying to annex me into the HOA. They were talking about destroying my house.
I immediately tapped the microphone icon on my screen to activate the two-way audio.
"GET OFF MY PROPERTY!" I shouted into the phone.
On the screen, my voice boomed out of the camera's external speaker, echoing loudly across the empty yard.
Margaret screamed, dropping her clipboard onto the grass. Richard jumped to his feet, spinning around wildly until his eyes locked onto the visible camera mounted on the corner of the house.
He didn't look embarrassed. He looked furious.
Richard reached into his canvas bag, pulled out a long steel crowbar, and marched directly toward the camera lens.
"Hey! Stop right there!" I yelled into the phone.
Richard didn't hesitate. He swung the heavy iron bar directly at the lens.