"I'm not going to take long," Brandon said.
"We're out tomorrow by noon. I just — " He looked down at the gravel between them, at the exact ground, and Mike understood that looking at it was not an accident.
"I want to say it while it's still mine to say. I convinced myself the line was where I wanted it to be."
"That's the truth of the whole thing, the whole fall. I wanted the parking, I wanted the house to feel — finished, I wanted the number we were asking to be true, and wanting it started to feel like evidence."
"Like, if I could picture it clearly enough, the picture was a survey."
He laughed once, with nothing in it.
"My guy with the cones — that wasn't even a surveyor, Mike. That was a landscaper Kayla's brother knows, with a tape measure and an opinion, and I knew it."
"I knew it the day you stood in my kitchen and asked to see the survey and I said it was being finalized. It was never being anything."
He shook his head at the gravel.
"The trailer. The fence crew in your yard while you were at work, like cowards."
"Your kid's — Ben's face at that window the night of the tow, I saw that too, I've seen it since, more than the cars. I'm sorry."
"About all of it, the money and the rest of it, but mostly that it was done the way it was done. Sneaky."
"That's the word I've landed on. I'm not a sneaky man, or I didn't used to think so."
Mike let the silence sit a moment, not as a punishment, just because a thing said that honestly deserves a beat before anybody files it away. He thought about four months of his life, and the folder in the desk drawer, and a boy conducting a trailer with two mittens.
He thought about what forgiveness would even be for, since the checks had cleared and the gravel was down — it would not be for Brandon's benefit, entirely, and it would not be a performance, because performances were what had started all of this.
"All right," Mike said, and put out his hand.
Brandon took it like a man taking a rope.
"The street'll be fine, Brandon. It was fine before the fence and it's fine now."
"You go on and — wherever you're headed, buy the survey first."
That got something out of him that was almost a laugh and almost not, and he nodded several times, and said, "Yeah. Yeah, that's — yeah," and turned and walked back across both driveways, over the true line both ways without looking down at it, which was, Mike decided, its own kind of progress.
The truck came at nine the next morning and was gone by two.
Kayla had not come to the door — she had managed the move from inside, the way she had managed the window — but at the end, when the truck had pulled away and the loaded SUV idled at the curb for the last look, she was in the passenger seat with the window down, and as the car rolled past 812 she lifted one hand, flat, not quite a wave and not quite anything else, a signal without a codebook.
Mike, standing in his yard with a rake he'd been holding for twenty minutes, lifted his own hand back. It cost him nothing.
That was the discovery of the whole year, possibly: how much of it had never needed to cost anything, and how expensive it gets when a man insists on paying full price for being wrong.
The Farrells arrived the following Saturday with a rental truck, a beagle of advanced opinions, and a toddler in a red snowsuit who supervised the unloading from the lawn in a folding chair sized exactly to him.
The husband was a quiet man with a tool belt that suggested competence; the wife had the quick, assessing friendliness of a person who has decided in advance to like a street and is gathering confirmation.
On the Tuesday after, in the evening, she came across with a pie in a glass dish and a kitchen towel over it, the toddler riding her hip, and stood at the edge of Mike's driveway — at the edge of it, he noticed, with an instinct that promised well for everyone — while the beagle investigated the pad with the thoroughness of a building inspector.
"We come in peace and with pie," she said.
"Apple. I'm told it's the official instrument for this."
Mike took the dish and thanked her and asked after the house, and she said the house was wonderful, the heat was eccentric, the toddler had already hidden a shoe in a vent.
Then, half-joking and only half, she tipped her head at the long black-and-gravel run of the drive between the two houses and said, "So. We heard — well, the agent told us some of it, and then the internet told us the rest of it, and I swore I wouldn't bring it up and here I am bringing it up."
"Are there any rules about the driveway we should know?"
Mike smiled. He could feel the whole street's history compress itself into the question, and the question deserved the shortest true answer he had.
"Just one," he said.
"It's yours, and this one's mine, and that's what makes it friendly."
She laughed, and the toddler, hearing the laugh, laughed too, at nothing, in the way of toddlers, and the beagle put its nose to the true line and then trotted cheerfully across it in both directions, belonging nowhere in particular and welcome everywhere, which Mike chose, on balance, to take as the street healing in real time.
Paula Lindgren came to pull her stakes on the first Tuesday of April, because a survey is not finished, she said, until the ground is closed, and the ground had stood open all winter like a question nobody was asking anymore.
Mike had called it his own idea and then immediately confessed to her that it had been Frank's — "You don't leave another surveyor's pins and stakes standing in a settled matter, Michael, it's like leaving scaffolding on a church" — and Frank came over for it with two coffees and stood on the pad with his hands in his jacket pockets, an old surveyor paying respects at a small ceremony of his trade.
Paula worked down the line with a stake puller and a canvas roll, unhurried, wiping each stake clean on her pant leg before she laid it in the roll, and the pink flagging came away last, faded by a winter of sun to the color of old roses.
"Ground's yours in every tense now," she said.
"Was, is, and recorded."
She left him the final plat in a cardboard tube, stamped and signed, and refused the coffee and then, at the curb, accepted it, and stood drinking it while Frank told her about a boundary dispute in 1987 involving a cemetery and a very confident bulldozer operator, and she laughed the particular laugh of a person hearing about her own profession's eternal war.