This — " she flicked the letter with one finger, and it made a rich, expensive sound " — is a bluff dressed as a brief. He knows it.
"I know it. The only people who don't know it are the two who are paying him by the hour to write it."
"So what do we do?"
"We do what the letter hopes we won't."
Dana pulled a legal pad toward her.
"We build the case they can't bluff: your survey, your photos, the demand, this nonsense in reply. And we keep one eye on the only door they actually care about."
She tapped the pad.
"People like the Prescotts don't buy houses to live in, Mike. They buy them to sell."
"The day that house gets listed, you call me before you finish your coffee, and we record a lis pendens with the register of deeds — a public notice that this title is in litigation. It's just paper."
"But paper, filed in the right office, beats paint every time."
The street, meanwhile, was conducting its own survey, and its instruments were not as good as Paula Lindgren's.
A neighbor from three doors down stopped on the sidewalk with his dog straining at the leash and said, with the sympathy of a man who has been given to understand the whole affair, "Heard you two are in a thing over eight inches of patio or something."
"Eight inches is the patio," Mike said.
"The fence is ten feet over. Sixty feet long."
"My trailer is sitting behind it. Go stand on my porch and look at the pink flags — those are my corners."
"The fence isn't near them."
The man went and looked, because Mike pointed and because curiosity is the most reliable force on any street. He stood a while with his dog forgotten at his side, looking at the two lines of pink survey lath standing their ten feet of lawn away from the black fence.
"That's not eight inches, Mike," he said finally, in the tone of a man revising a vote.
"No," Mike said.
"It is not."
But a woman at the mailboxes the next day only shook her head at him, gently, the way you'd address a man making a scene in a restaurant.
"Can't you two just work it out? All this lawyer business — people are starting to talk about what it does to the street."
"I offered to work it out," Mike said.
"I asked him to move his fence off my land. That's the working-out."
"He laughed and told me to call a lawyer, so I called one."
Kate, hearing it all repeated at the dinner table, speared a green bean and delivered the street's weather report.
"Half of Hickory Lane thinks Brandon stole a driveway. The other half thinks you did, somehow, retroactively."
"Give them time. People come around to measurements eventually."
"It's the one thing measurements are for."
The township, at least, moved faster than the courts. Mike knew Tom Wozniak the way you know a man across a permit counter for twenty years — they'd argued about setback lines on Mike's own jobs, and Tom had once made him move a dumpster four feet on a Tuesday and been right.
Tom pulled the Prescott file in the township office while Mike stood at the counter with his survey under his arm, and the file, when it came up on the screen, was the shortest document in the history of Hartley Township.
"Nothing," Tom said.
"No application. No site plan."
"No permit, no inspection, no nothing."
He turned the screen so Mike could see the empty fields himself.
"A six-foot fence in a side yard needs a permit and a plan in this township, Mike. You know that; I've cited you for less and you've paid it smiling."
"They didn't pull so much as a dog license out of this office."
"They built first," Mike said.
"They built first and figured God would grade it later."
Tom printed the violation notice on township letterhead — unlawful structure, no permit, corrective action required within fourteen days, fines accruing thereafter, a copy delivered to the county as well so it would follow the property and not just the mailbox.
He drove it out to Hickory Lane himself that afternoon and posted it on the Prescotts' front door with the ceremony of a man who had posted a thousand of them and still believed in the institution of the orange notice.
That Friday there was a cookout two doors down, burgers going, kids orbiting on bikes, half the street in somebody's front yard with paper plates.
Mike was in his own driveway scraping the grill when Maddie came down the sidewalk from her friend's house at the corner, walking slowly, holding her phone in one hand and something orange and crumpled in the other like a rescued bird.
"Dad," she said.
"For the folder."
Brandon had come out onto his porch in front of God and Hickory Lane, read the notice off his own door, and torn it down.
He balled it up and dropped it in the grass at the edge of the street, and then, Maddie reported, with the flat delivery of a war correspondent, he'd held an audience: Brandon by his grill, telling two couples from down the street that Mike Sorensen was "weaponizing the township" over "a strip of gravel," that some men couldn't stand to see a house on their street get nicer, that it was envy, basically, plain and sad.
One of the couples had laughed in the right places.
Mike smoothed the violation notice open on the kitchen counter, flattening Brandon's fist out of it crease by crease, and slid it into a sheet protector, where it joined the survey, the photos, the demand letter, and the bluff dressed as a brief.
"Weaponizing the township," Kate said that night, reading Maddie's account over his shoulder while the notice lay between them like something at a museum.
"Over a strip of gravel."
"A strip of gravel I own," Mike said.
"Six hundred square feet of it. He keeps leaving out the deed part."
"He keeps leaving out every part that isn't his."
Then, on a bright Sunday in the middle of September, Kate stood at the kitchen counter with her phone in her hand and said, "Mike. Come and look at this," in the voice she used for news that needed a witness.
The listing was live. Six hundred eighty-nine thousand dollars — one hundred seventy-four thousand more than the Prescotts had paid in April, a fact Kayla's own spring announcements on the street had made common knowledge.
Her brokerage's sign stood in their front yard with her name and photograph on it, smiling out at Hickory Lane. Thirty-eight photographs, professionally shot, professionally lit.
And there it was, photograph twelve, a drone shot from above the street in the golden hour: the long black driveway sweeping down the side of the house and opening, generous and gleaming, into a parking court behind it, with Brandon's SUV parked on it in the foreground and the edge of Mike's trailer cropped at the frame like a piece of lawn furniture.
The caption under the listing read: Oversized extended driveway — parking for guests, RVs, boats, and all the toys. Ben read it over Mike's arm.
"They're selling our driveway?" he said.