I looked at the tomato beds through the kitchen window. "She picked every room in this house. I don't know how to leave without feeling like I'm leaving her twice."
He stopped talking about moving after that. Instead, he helped me repair the old Ford pickup in the garage, a 1987 model Sarah and I had owned when our savings barely covered rent. Its fenders were patchy with primer, but the engine was sound. Every Saturday, Marcus and I worked on one small piece while Sarah's favorite classic-rock station played from a dusty radio above the workbench.
Delilah Thornwick arrived in Willowbrook four years before that terrible autumn. She was fifty-two, a successful real estate agent by her own account, and the proud owner of a white BMW polished so often I sometimes wondered whether she trusted the paint to stay attached. She moved with a brisk, purposeful stride and wore sunglasses even on days when the clouds made them unnecessary.
At first she was charming. She complimented Sarah's flowers, brought sparkling water to pool gatherings, and volunteered for a committee to improve the clubhouse. Within six months she was campaigning for HOA president on a platform of protecting property values and raising community standards.
The slogans sounded harmless until she began explaining what she meant. A basketball hoop became an aesthetic violation. A vegetable garden became evidence of declining neighborhood character. A porch chair left beside the front door became a possible insurance concern. The neighborhood stopped being a collection of homes and became a catalog of things Delilah thought should be corrected.
The first argument I witnessed was over the Kowalskis' tomato plants. Ethel Kowalski, a seventy-three-year-old retired paralegal, had grown vegetables in the same patch for years. Delilah stood at the edge of her driveway and announced that fruiting plants had no place in the visual identity of a premium residential community.
Ethel looked down at the basket in her hands. "Then what do you call the produce in the grocery store? Decorative merchandise?"
Delilah did not appreciate the question. She wrote a violation notice and tucked it beneath the windshield wiper of Ethel's car, even though the document did not identify a governing rule. Ethel photographed the notice, dated it, and placed it in one of the color-coded folders that would eventually become important to all of us.
The Santos family lived three houses down. Tom Santos coached youth baseball, his wife Elena worked at a public elementary school, and their grown son Jerome visited so often it was hard to tell whether he had actually moved out. The family's basketball hoop had been bolted beside their garage before Delilah bought a house on the street.
She fined them for it anyway. When Tom asked her to identify the rule, she sent a second letter warning that continued noncompliance could affect resale value. Jerome, who worked in cybersecurity and had spent years watching companies make expensive decisions based on invented certainty, began keeping copies of every notice.