For three days I let Cordelia build her paper empire. I let her collect signatures for the golf-cart easement, let the board approve the scenic-corridor assessment, let the realtor list four homes with “unobstructed fairway frontage” at premiums of ninety thousand dollars each. Every claim they made in writing was a brick I would later drop on them. Only then did I return to the workshop, slide open the drawer marked RIDGE EASEMENT, and lift out the cedar-scented folder my grandfather had sealed in 1951.

Inside were the deeds. Not just to my land, but to the strip beneath the eighteenth fairway itself. Walter Barrett had never sold that corridor. He had leased it, ninety-nine years, with one recorded clause I read three times before my hands began to shake. Any unauthorized alteration of the ridge line voids the lease and reverts all improvements to the Barrett estate. Their championship hole, their cart path, their overlook. All of it now sat on land I owned outright, cleared by their own chainsaws.