She looked at me. "If you want me to promise a spectacular takedown by next Friday, hire somebody else. If you want a record that can survive serious scrutiny, we can talk."
I liked her immediately.
Rebecca reviewed the old deed and stopped me when I repeated my favorite phrase about owning every drop under the subdivision. "You have a potentially valuable bundle of documented rights," she said. "That is not the same as universal ownership of all groundwater in a shared aquifer. North Carolina water law and these old agreements need careful analysis. We're going to establish exactly what was reserved, what the developer promised, and what the utility had permission to do." I felt a little deflated, then embarrassed that I had wanted a simple answer more than an accurate one.
She continued. "There is real leverage here, Marcus. The development's approvals may depend on preserving access, flow, and water quality under terms that were not properly documented. If those promises were ignored, that matters. But I will not frighten innocent homeowners with a made-up bill. They didn't design the system, and many of them had no reason to suspect a defect in the original paperwork."
That was the moment I knew she understood the part of the case that mattered to me most. I wanted Vivian held accountable. I wanted our lake restored. I wanted the legal harassment stopped, and I wanted the company that had treated my water to answer for its errors. I did not want to put hundreds of families under a financial threat they had never knowingly created.
Rebecca agreed to represent us alongside Tom, dividing the responsibilities so we weren't paying two lawyers to do the same task. She hired an independent restoration specialist to work with Dr. Mitchell and brought in an accountant familiar with homeowner association records. She drafted formal preservation demands to the association, Clearwater, Pristine Landscaping, and the utility operator. She also instructed me to forward every new message, even the ones that seemed trivial, without replying in anger.
"Why the trivial ones?" I asked. "Because cases are often built from what people thought was too small to save," she answered. "A date in an invoice. A changed meeting minute."
"A message claiming nobody authorized a payment. One thing becomes important only after we can compare it with another." She tapped the photographs of dead fish. "And because nobody should ever be able to say you manufactured the story after the fact."
By the end of that week, an investigative journalist named Sarah Morgan had contacted me. She had covered HOA disputes before and had heard about our case from residents worried about their water. I didn't want a television circus, but I also knew silence had protected Vivian's version of events for months. Rebecca recommended that I speak carefully, share public documents, and keep private medical and investigative information out of the story until it was properly verified.