"They purchased in the spring, Your Honor."
"In April," Dana said, from her seat, without looking up from her notes.
"They closed April eleventh."
"April," the judge said.
"And the paving occurred in August."
He turned a page of the file with deliberation.
"The statutory period for adverse possession in Michigan is fifteen years. Your clients are short by approximately fourteen years and eight months."
"Is there a version of this argument that improves if you make it more slowly?"
"No, Your Honor."
"Then let's not."
He made a note.
"What else does equity disfavor, counsel? It disfavors a man paving his neighbor's land while the neighbor is at work and calling the result a settled state of affairs."
"I have read the survey. I have read the letters."
"I have seen the photographs, including the ones with the motor cars stacked on the plaintiff's driveway like a dealership, which I gather occurred after the certified warning, which I also gather the defendant signed for. Anything else?"
The smooth young man, to his credit, sat down. The order, when it came at the end of the week, was two pages long and read the way Dana said good orders read: like a set of instructions.
The court found that the fence and the asphalt strip were located on land owned by the plaintiff. The defendants had no right, title, claim, or color of claim.
Removal of the fence and the asphalt, and restoration of the plaintiff's gravel surface, was ordered at the defendants' sole expense, to be completed within thirty days.
The defendants and their guests were enjoined from parking on any portion of the plaintiff's driveway in the meantime. Six hundred square feet, Mike thought, reading it at Dana's office with the rain ticking the windows.
Thirty days. He had been a paving contractor for nineteen years and a homeowner for nine, and it remained a strange arithmetic to him that taking the strip had required one August day and forty-one pages of log and a surveyor and a lawyer and a judge to begin giving it back.
"You look disappointed," Dana said.
"I look," Mike said, "like a man who was told the fence he can see from his kitchen window is officially not his problem to remove, and officially still there."
He folded the order.
"Thirty days. What do you want to bet me?"
"I don't bet on my own cases," Dana said.
"It's unprofessional."
A pause.
"But if I did, I'd take the under on thirty days being the end of it, and so would you."
That night he told the kids at the dinner table that a judge had read the whole file and said the fence and the blacktop were on their land and had to come out within thirty days, at the Prescotts' expense.
Maddie, who was fourteen and followed the case the way other freshmen followed feuds, asked whether that meant the trailer came home for Thanksgiving.
Ben asked whether Brandon had to take the fence down himself with his own hands, and looked so hopeful that Kate had to leave the room on the pretense of checking the laundry.
"Thirty days is what the paper says," Mike said.
"Papers are patient, buddy. They can afford to be."
"It's everything else that has to learn how."
He put the order in the folder with the log and the survey and the certified-mail receipt, in the drawer of the sideboard where the family kept the documents that mattered — the deed, the insurance, the kids' birth certificates — because that was where it belonged now.
It was a household paper. It said whose house this was.
The depositions took place the following week, in a conference room in Dana's building with a long table and a court reporter's machine ticking like a small, patient insect.
Mike sat beside Dana with his hands folded and listened to the foundation of the whole Prescott position come out of Brandon's own mouth, one sworn answer at a time. Dana had subpoenaed the survey.
For months the word had done heavy work in the Prescott house — Brandon had it surveyed, it's filed, check your own documents; the survey had been invoked at doors and over fences like a deed to the high ground.
Dana requested its production with the pleasant inexorability of a woman laying a trap she had already photographed from three angles, and what arrived, three days before Brandon's deposition, in a folder with the invoice still stapled to it, was eleven pages of printout from a website.
It was called a Property Line Report. It cost a hundred and ninety-nine dollars.
The map on page three showed the lots on Hickory Lane as smooth featureless lozenges, the boundaries overlaid from county parcel data, and at the bottom of every page, in type small but perfectly legible, ran the sentence: This report is an estimate for informational purposes only and is not a land survey.
Boundary locations shown are approximate and should not be relied upon for construction, fencing, or legal purposes. Dana put it in front of Brandon and let the reporter get it into the record, page by page, disclaimer by disclaimer.
"Mr. Prescott," she said, "is this the survey you referred to in your letter to my client in August?"
"It's the report our — the information we relied on."
"Did a licensed surveyor ever visit your property?"
"We obtained professional documentation."
"That's not my question. Did a surveyor — a person, with instruments — ever stand on your land and measure it?"
Brandon's attorney objected to the form of the question. Brandon answered anyway, because Brandon always answered anyway; it was, Mike was coming to understand, the whole architecture of the man.
"The company we hired for the paving evaluated the site."
That company got its turn the next day. The paving contractor was a tired man named Rich who wore his good shirt and his resentment into the room in equal measure, and under oath he dismantled in four minutes what Brandon had built in four months.
No, nobody measured anything. No, he hadn't pulled a tape on the lot line; he didn't do surveys, he did asphalt.
The homeowner had walked the yard with him and pointed — pointed — at where the fence should run and where the pad should start, said the line was "about there" and that the paperwork was handled.
Had he asked for a survey? He had not.
Had he checked for pins? There was a pin somewhere, the homeowner said it was wrong.
He'd paved where he was told to pave. He had a business to run.
He was not, the record reflected, paid to ask questions, and at this the reporter typed steadily and Brandon's attorney studied the grain of the tabletop as if it were a document in the case. Kayla's deposition was quieter and, in its way, worse.
She was precise and composed and clearly determined to be the reasonable one, right up until Dana walked her to the listing.
"Who wrote the description of the property for the listing, Mrs. Prescott?"
"I did, with input from my broker."
"Room for six plus guests," Dana read.
"Oversized extended driveway. Are those your words?"
"Marketing language is standard — " "Did you believe, when you wrote them, that the extended portion of the driveway belonged to your property?"