She responded by hiring a Pittsburgh firm with an impressive website and lawyers whose letters seemed designed to make every reader feel poor. They demanded that I abandon my claims and warned me about legal fees. Their first settlement offer was delivered in an envelope thick enough to suggest generosity. It provided that each side would walk away, neither admitting fault, and that the HOA would donate five thousand dollars to a veterans charity in my grandfather's name.
Mitch showed me the proposal at the diner near the courthouse. I was halfway through a cheeseburger when he pushed it across the table. "They want the public to see them as reasonable," he said. "The donation is theater, but theater sometimes works."
I read Pops's name in the draft press release. They hadn't even spelled Sullivan correctly the first time. I thought of the bulldozer blade pushing the parapet into the water while Darlene recorded it. "Tell them no," I said, and went back to my lunch, although I no longer wanted it.
Within two days, screenshots began arriving from Meadowbrook's private online group. Darlene was telling residents that I had blocked flood mitigation work and endangered their families for the sake of obsolete infrastructure. Somebody photographed my pickup and described it as evidence that I neglected my property. A board member made a cruel remark about how my grief after Ellen's death might have affected my judgment. Strangers who had never seen my bridge before it was demolished wrote that I sounded unstable.