Paula asked what the installation had cost. I gave her the figure from the invoice and explained the additional expenses for access and fittings. Martin wanted to know whether I had asked the fire district to use it during the incident. I told him I had made the reserve available and that the crew had independently decided to connect to it after checking the site.
"So if you had taken it down in September," Paula said, "that water wouldn't have been here?"
"Correct," I replied. "But it doesn't follow that the houses would necessarily have burned. I won't claim a result nobody can prove."
They were silent for a moment. Then Grant asked whether I would allow the fire district to survey the site for future planning. I told him I would consider any written request from the district and would expect the association not to confuse emergency use with ownership. Paula nodded, and for the first time since we met I felt she was asking questions because she wanted the answers, not because she needed support for a decision already made.
Before leaving, Martin asked whether the tank could be painted to match the garage more closely. The question surprised me enough that I laughed. I told him I would gladly discuss reasonable screening or color choices after the association withdrew the invalid charges and settled the issue of its authority. He smiled faintly and admitted that he had asked out of habit.
"We've spent so much time on appearance," he said, "we forgot to ask what the equipment does."
I thought about that sentence after they left. A community needs standards, and attractive surroundings are not unimportant. But standards become destructive when the people enforcing them stop distinguishing between a rule's purpose and their own preference. Martin's question suggested he was beginning to see the difference, which was more than I could have said about the board a month earlier.
The emergency meeting was announced for nine days after the fire. It was scheduled in the same room behind the Milford Road station, but this time the notice included a special agenda concerning wildfire preparedness, enforcement policy, and the county assessment. A separate notice advised that an attorney would attend to explain the association's legal position. For the first time, the letterhead carried Grant's name above Celeste's, because he had been asked to chair the discussion.
Celeste objected to that arrangement. I learned later that she considered it an attempt to embarrass her, and I understood why it felt that way from her perspective. She had spent years running meetings with little resistance, and suddenly a man who had once avoided difficult votes was setting the agenda. But embarrassment and injustice are not the same thing, and a president does not own the chair merely by occupying it long enough.
On the evening of the meeting, the parking lot filled before sunset. I saw residents from every street, some carrying notebooks and others holding printouts of the county report. A few people had never attended a meeting before, and I recognized the Ostranders standing near the entrance, Henry with his cane and his wife beside him. There were sixty or seventy people by the time Grant called the session to order, enough that the fire station loaned extra folding chairs.