Gary Purcell called me on a Thursday evening. He identified himself immediately. He apologized for calling directly and said he understood if I preferred to route everything through attorneys. I told him I was listening. He said there was significant division on the board. He said Thorne was pushing hard for full litigation, but that three other board members were not willing to take that path.
He said the honest financial reality was that Maplewood Estates did not have the reserves to fund a prolonged legal battle. Their HOA dues collections were already strained. A legal expense would require a special assessment on all forty-seven homeowners. That was not a popular option. I thanked Gary for the information. I told him again that everything needed to go through Patricia. He said he understood. He said he just wanted me to know that not everyone on that board was Richard Thorne.
I documented the call. I sent the notes to Patricia. Two days before the thirty-day deadline expired, Calloway sent a new letter. The tone had shifted completely. The aggressive legal posturing was gone. He wrote that his client was prepared to engage in good-faith negotiations toward a formal easement agreement, and that they were open to discussing reasonable compensation for historical usage. He requested a negotiation meeting within the following two weeks.
Patricia called me after reading it. She said, “Dale, they blinked.” She recommended we agree to the meeting, but on our terms. She proposed that the meeting take place in her office. She proposed that both attorneys be present. She proposed that the HOA bring their full financial disclosure, reserves, annual budget, dues structure, so we could assess what a realistic settlement figure looked like. Calloway agreed to all three conditions within twenty-four hours.
The meeting was scheduled for a Tuesday afternoon two weeks out. I spent those two weeks doing one additional thing Patricia had suggested. She wanted a formal written opinion from a second water-rights attorney, someone outside her firm, confirming the strength of our legal position. She said it would serve two purposes. First, it would give us an independent confirmation we could reference in negotiations. Second, if Thorne tried to argue in the meeting that our case was weaker than we claimed, we could produce a second attorney’s written opinion saying otherwise.
I hired a water-rights specialist named Daniel Cross from a firm in the state capital. He reviewed the full file over four days. His written opinion was six pages. His conclusion was unambiguous. The encroachment was clear. The documentation was thorough. The HOA’s implied-easement defense was very unlikely to succeed given the board minutes showing prior knowledge. He assessed our litigation position as strong. I added his opinion to the binder. The binder now required a second volume.
On the Monday before the negotiation meeting, Richard Thorne sent one final letter directly to my mailing address, bypassing both attorneys entirely. It was two paragraphs. He wrote that I was destroying a community. He wrote that families depended on that water. He wrote that a decent person would simply grant the easement without demanding compensation for something that had never harmed me. I read it once. I photographed it. I filed it. I did not respond.
The next morning, I drove to Patricia’s office. I set both binder volumes on her conference table. I sat down. I drank my coffee. I waited for Tuesday. The negotiation meeting began at two o’clock in the afternoon. Patricia’s conference room was clean and quiet. I sat on one side of the table with Patricia beside me. Across from us sat Brett Calloway and two people he introduced as Richard Thorne and the HOA’s property manager, a woman named Sandra Vail. Gary Purcell was not present. I noted that.