I walked down the drive and stopped on my side of the fence. She looked tired, and for a moment I could almost see the woman she might have been before every neighborhood problem became a test of her authority. She asked whether we could talk, and I told her we could.
"I heard your operation is doing very well," she said.
"We're keeping busy."
She looked past me toward the water. "You turned those fish into a business."
"With help from the trust, specialists, and a lot of people who know how to work. Yes."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I hope you're satisfied. The expansion is gone. People still blame me for everything that happened."
I waited. She seemed to expect me to argue or reassure her, and I did neither. At last she said she had only wanted to resolve a difficult environmental problem without delaying the community's plans.
"You could have asked," I said.
She looked at me. "What?"
"You could have asked whether you could use my pond. You could have told the trust what you wanted to do with its fish. You could have asked the board to read the whole report instead of relying on a summary. You could have told the developer there were rights to investigate before it drew houses over the corridor."
Her gaze dropped to the gravel. "I thought we had everything covered."
"You had paperwork," I said. "That isn't the same thing."
She looked up again, and for a moment I thought she might finally apologize. Instead, she asked whether I had ever imagined the fish could be worth so much. I told her I had not, not at the beginning, and that even now the business's value depended on years of work rather than the accident of their arrival.
"I never wanted any of this," she said.
"Neither did I."
She gave a tired little laugh that held no humor. "You always have an answer."
"No, Karen. That's the one thing I spent two years learning not to pretend. I didn't have the answers when the fish came here. I found people who did, and I listened to them."
We stood in silence long enough for a bird to call from the trees. She looked at the pond again and said she wished she had handled things differently. It was the nearest she came to an apology. I told her I hoped she would, if she ever found herself responsible for other people's property again.
As she turned toward her car, she glanced back. "You made a fortune out of my mistake."
I shook my head. "You dumped the inventory on my property. I figured out what it was worth, and then we did the work required to make it useful. Those are two different things."
She considered that for a moment, then opened the driver's door. The SUV rolled away slowly, disappearing around the same curve where I had watched it vanish on the first morning. I did not feel victorious. I felt as though a conversation that had been going on in my head for two years had finally reached its last sentence.