"Me too."
"Are you?"
I considered the question. "I'm relieved. It isn't quite the same thing."
She took off her glasses and wiped them with a cloth. "Relief is underrated," she said. "Especially at our age."
Outside, Marcus waited by the courthouse steps. He asked whether we wanted coffee, then insisted on buying it before anybody could start calculating whose turn it was. The three of us sat at a small table near the window while traffic moved through the intersection.
"Mom would have liked Ethel," Marcus told me.
"She would have talked her into planting vegetables in the clubhouse flower beds," I said.
"I already have plans," Ethel replied. "Don't tell the board until I have the drawing finished."
That made us laugh, and the laughter felt better than I expected. It did not erase the previous months. It confirmed that they no longer owned the room.
The real estate licensing decision came later, through a separate administrative process. Delilah's license was revoked after the agency considered the conviction and related findings, subject to the procedures and review available under its rules. The result was serious, but it was not a magical consequence produced by one triumphant police call.
Her business contracts also unraveled as clients and counterparties reviewed the public record. Some were terminated, some disputed, and others continued through settlement negotiations handled by counsel. I stopped following those developments when they no longer affected Willowbrook or the victims who were seeking repayment.
I had spent enough time measuring my days by what happened to Delilah. I wanted to start measuring them by what happened here, in the house Sarah chose and the neighborhood she believed could still be kind.
Rebuilding a neighborhood turned out to be less dramatic than exposing a dishonest president. Nobody arrived with a projector full of damning evidence when the drainage channel needed cleaning. There were no cameras waiting when the new board asked whether the pool pump should be replaced before or after the cracked walkway was repaired.
Those were ordinary questions, and they mattered precisely because nobody could turn them into a dramatic confrontation. If we wanted Willowbrook to survive what had happened, somebody had to care about purchase orders, insurance premiums, reserve forecasts, and whether the elderly woman near the corner could safely use the sidewalk after dark.
Ethel understood this immediately. She scheduled the first open budget workshop on a Tuesday evening and asked every director to bring the last five years of maintenance records. She also requested a plain-language summary from the accountant so residents who had never studied financial statements could understand where their dues were going.
"An open book doesn't help if nobody can read it," she told the room. "We're going to explain the numbers, and then we're going to answer the questions. Every one of them."
The meeting lasted three hours. One resident wanted to know why pool chemicals cost more than expected. Another wanted an explanation for a landscaping contract that seemed high compared with neighboring communities. A third asked whether we could stop paying for security patrols that spent most of their time circling the same three streets.