He built the fence on a Saturday, and I almost didn’t notice.
That’s the part people never believe when I tell this story now. I didn’t come storming out of my house the moment the first post went into the ground. I was inside making coffee, half-watching the news, and it wasn’t until I heard the compressor kick on that I even looked out the kitchen window. Two men in matching polo shirts were unloading cedar panels from a trailer parked crooked across Tyler’s driveway. Tyler himself stood at the edge of what I still thought was my yard, arms crossed, nodding at something one of the workers said, looking like a man supervising the construction of his own kingdom.
I remember thinking, that’s a big project for a Saturday. I remember thinking it was none of my business exactly where he put a fence on his own property. That’s the thing about boundaries — you don’t think about them until somebody moves one, and by then it can already feel too late to say anything without looking petty.
By afternoon the frame was up. By evening, most of the panels were in. I walked out with a mug of coffee going cold in my hand and stood at what I had always understood to be the line between our two lots, and something looked wrong. The angle was off. My mower had been cutting a straight path along that boundary for eleven years, ever since I bought the house from the Reynolds family, and now there was a brand-new fence sitting well inside where that path should have been.
I didn’t say anything that first night. I told myself I was imagining it, that fences always look strange when they’re new, that maybe the shadows were playing tricks on me in the fading light. I went back inside and told myself I’d look again in the morning.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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