Like, they really thought they could just do that. I walked down to the edge of my property where a couple of maintenance guys were working near a cart path. “Hey,” I called out. They looked up a little wary. Those trees back there. Who told you to cut them? One of them shrugged, leaning on his rake. We were told to clear overgrowth along the boundary.
Those weren’t overgrowth, I said. Those were my trees. Another shrug. We just follow orders, man. And that was it. No apology, no explanation, just a quiet little wall of indifference. I walked back to the house that evening, grabbed the old property survey from a drawer I hadn’t opened in years, and spread it out on the kitchen table.
And as I traced the boundary line with my finger, something in me shifted because those trees, they weren’t even close to the edge. They were well inside my property, which meant this wasn’t a misunderstanding. This was a decision, a deliberate one. And standing there looking at those lines on paper, I realized something else. They hadn’t just taken my trees.
They’d made a mistake. A big one. I didn’t sleep much that night. Not because I was angry. Well, okay. I was angry, but it was something sharper than that. Something colder. The kind of feeling that settles in your chest when you realize someone didn’t just cross a line. They assumed you wouldn’t do anything about it.
And that part, that part bothered me more than the trees because it meant they’d already decided who I was. Quiet guy lives alone, keeps to himself, probably won’t make a fuss. They weren’t entirely wrong about the first part, but they were about to be very wrong about the second. The next morning, I called a surveyor. Name was Pete Holloway.
