On December 15, I went fishing again. The air was cold, but the water in the sheltered central basin remained open under a pale winter sun. I cast near the shore below the hillside where cabin number forty-seven had once stood. The slope was now part of a recovering natural landscape, and the remaining marks of construction were fading beneath new vegetation. I caught a trout after the first half hour, admired the silver movement of its body, and slipped it carefully back into the water.
My phone vibrated with a message from David. The remaining administrative and settlement matters had been resolved, and his office was closing the file. He wrote that I could finally stop thinking of the case number every time I looked across the lake. I smiled because the truth was that I had already begun. There were mornings now when I remembered the weather forecast, the trout, or what Emma had said on the telephone before I remembered Garrett's name.
A small motor sounded from the north, and I turned to see my neighbor Mike Henderson approaching in his fishing boat. Mike owned roughly two hundred acres beyond the northern boundary of my property, and we had known each other for years without ever needing to know very much about one another. He slowed as he came alongside, lifted a hand, and said the lake looked better than it had in a long time. I agreed and told him the fish seemed to think so, too.
We drifted a comfortable distance apart, casting into the same cold water. After a while Mike asked whether he could say something without offending me. I told him I had survived much worse questions in court.
He laughed, then asked what half the county had been asking since the drawdown began. "Was it worth it, James? All of it? The empty lake, the lawsuits, the demolition, the money?"
I reeled in slowly before answering. I told him about the day I returned from Portland and counted the cabins twice because I could not believe what I was seeing. I told him about Garrett refusing to produce a deed while promising to fight me for years. I told him about my grandfather buying the shore and the cost of maintaining a lake that other people had suddenly claimed as a business asset. Then I told him about the people who had trusted Garrett and lost money they had worked all their lives to save.
"That's the part I keep thinking about," Mike said. "Those investors. They didn't pour the foundations themselves." I agreed. They had been harmed, and I would never pretend otherwise. But I reminded him that the original harm had begun when the association sold and occupied property it did not own, then refused to resolve the problem when confronted.
If I had accepted that arrangement simply because so much money had already been invested, the lesson would have been that anyone with sufficient resources could build first and force the owner to surrender later.
Mike nodded thoughtfully. "Still seems like you could have taken rent," he said. I pointed toward the eastern meadow and asked whether it looked as if it needed a hundred and nine rental decks to make it valuable. He looked, then shook his head. I told him that a lease might have produced an