“You do not.”
I looked at her.
“I wasn’t asking you.”
The foreman reached into his truck and pulled out a business card.
“The office can send the work order.”
“Thank you.”
Vanessa stared at him.
“Silver Ridge is your client.”
He looked at the stumps, then at me.
“And those were apparently his trees.”
Nobody spoke after that.
The chipper shut down.
For the first time since I arrived, the property became quiet.
Vanessa waited until the crew began gathering tools.
“You are not turning this into some ridiculous lawsuit.”
“I haven’t decided what I’m turning it into.”
“The association acted in good faith.”
“You were sitting ten feet from me when your own treasurer said there was no recorded easement.”
“We have legal arguments.”
“You also told an entire room nobody was proposing to remove trees from my property.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I know exactly what you meant.”
Her mouth tightened.
She looked again through the opening toward the lake.
I could almost see the calculation.
For her, the trees had always been an obstruction.
Now they were gone.
Problem solved.
Vanessa believed she had finally forced reality to match the architectural rendering in her head.
What she did not know was that six months earlier, before she ever walked onto my property and called my trees “vegetation,” the county had already approved something else for that exact part of my land.
A fabrication building.
One hundred twenty feet long.
Forty feet deep.
Twenty feet high on the western elevation.
Steel framed.
Dark charcoal siding.
And positioned almost exactly where the trees had stood.
There was only one reason I had not built it yet.
The trees.