By then, the kitchen table had become something I had not wanted in my new life: a place to work. It held folders, tabs, maps, photographs, and a notebook divided into dates and claims. I labeled one folder RECORDED DOCUMENTS, another CORRESPONDENCE, and a third ROAD HISTORY. There was satisfaction in seeing the information take shape, but I resented having to do it at all.
I had not moved to the lake to win arguments. I had moved to the lake because I wanted to sit beside the water and remember what it felt like not to be in an argument. On some evenings I closed the folders without reading another page and went down to Gerald's bench simply to prove the cabin still belonged to the life I had intended. The water usually helped, but not as much as it had that first afternoon.
Eighteen days passed after my last request without an answer from the association. I used them to order the complete chain of title for the property, going back more than fifty years. The clerk, Patricia, printed a stack nearly an inch thick and helped me identify the oldest legible descriptions. The land had remained in the Anderson family since 1952, and Gerald had inherited it from his father in 1987.
There were transfers, utility records, and the usual corrections to old surveys. There was nothing granting Pine Ridge Estates rights to my gravel road. I also found the permit for Gerald's original 2005 road construction, submitted as a private residential access improvement. The file named Gerald as the applicant and listed his parcel alone.
I sat in a diner afterward, spreading the old copies between my coffee and a plate of eggs. Outside, a school bus rolled through a drizzle that softened the mountains into gray outlines. Inside, a waitress refilled my cup without asking what I was reading. I was grateful for the ordinary kindness of a stranger who wanted nothing from me except the price of breakfast.
By the time I returned to the cabin, I had stopped expecting Amber Ward to produce an easement. I still wanted a judge, or at least an experienced attorney, to examine the possibility of an unrecorded or claimed right before I made a mistake. The easiest way to be wrong in a property dispute, I thought, was to become so certain of your own map that you forgot other people could bring evidence too.
I called an old colleague in Charlotte and asked for the name of a good real-estate litigator. He gave me Andrew Roberts, a lawyer in Raleigh who handled title disputes and had a reputation for telling clients what they needed to hear rather than what would make them happy. I booked an appointment, loaded my files into a banker's box, and drove east early on a Tuesday morning.
Roberts's office occupied a converted Victorian house near the state capital. He was in his early fifties, with gray hair and reading glasses he kept pushing up onto his forehead whenever he wanted to think. He invited me into a conference room where the furniture was plain and the bookshelves looked used. When I started explaining the situation, he interrupted only to ask which parcel actually contained the disputed junction.