Susan called after her children left for school. "People are asking me to be interim president," she said, sounding more alarmed than pleased. "I thought I was just trying to make sure we were telling the truth about a road. Now everybody wants me to take responsibility for the whole neighborhood."
"You can say no," I told her. "Nobody gets to turn your courage into an unpaid obligation."
She laughed softly. "You sound like someone who has worked too many overtime shifts."
"Guilty."
"But if I say no, somebody who helped Amber might step into the position and put us right back where we started."
I looked at the stack of exhibits beside the window. "Then get the records, ask for independent counsel, and make sure the job has limits. Being the most decent person in a room shouldn't mean you have to do every job in it."
That evening the remaining board announced a properly noticed meeting to appoint an interim president and establish a review committee. Susan agreed to serve on the condition that she would have access to the full records and that residents would receive regular financial reports. She was selected without opposition, though she said later that the silence during the vote felt less like confidence than fear of what leadership had become.
Her first act was not to call me. It was to ask the association's bookkeeper for every payment tied to road maintenance since 2009. Her second was to find out whether the original developer had left records that might explain the connection to Gerald's land. Her third was to invite homeowners to submit questions anonymously so that people who had signed Amber's petition could admit confusion without becoming targets themselves.
I admired the order of those decisions. She was not trying to become Amber's opposite by making promises nobody could keep. She was trying to understand what the association had been doing before asking anyone to trust it again.
The public fallout unfolded in messier ways. The original petition disappeared from the association's website, but copies circulated through the neighborhood. Bill Crawford called me one afternoon and asked whether I would speak with him on my porch. He arrived holding a folder and looking as though he had rehearsed a difficult conversation on the drive over.
"I told that room the road belonged to us," he said after I offered him a chair. "I believed it. I've believed it since my family moved here. Amber said it was settled before the first house was sold."
"I heard you," I replied.
He stared at his hands. "I helped sign the petition. I told two neighbors you were a bully. I even said you should have to pay for the road, and I had never checked where the road was."
I waited. A hurried apology can be a way of escaping the feeling that made the apology necessary. Bill seemed to know that, because he did not ask me to reassure him.