Three photographs. The cabin at the wallplate stage. Every course visible and square. The completed structure. The garden green and definite in summer light.
Who had arranged this? She already knew. She looked at the photographs and felt something arrive in her chest. Not quite anger, not quite something else. Something in between that was too complicated for one name.
Mr. Harlo arranged it, Garrett said very quietly without looking up. A photographer passing through in August. She did not look at Amos. She looked at the photographs.
The cabin looked exactly like what it was. Rough, unbut, real, the kind of structure that can only be built by someone who intends to stay. You could see it in the work. You could see it in the corners. You could see it in the garden rows spaced with the precision of someone who had cut a stick to the right length and used it because doing the thing right mattered more than doing it fast.
Commissioner Aldrich looked at the photographs for a long time. Vance objected to three of Garrett's points. Garrett answered each one with the relevant code section twice citing the exact points Clara had found in her own research. She watched Aldrich write something down when Garrett cited the second one, which was the point she had been most certain about, and which Garrett had refined most carefully. "Aldrich wrote, and did not look up, and she did not look at Dunar." Then Aldrich looked at her directly.
"Mrs. Whitmore," he said. "Is there anything you want to say directly to this office?" Garrett put his hand flat on the table. She understood the signal. "Wait, defer.
Let the record speak." She looked at Garrett. She looked at Garrett's hand. She looked at Commissioner Aldrich. "My husband registered this land legally," she said. "He died before he could build on it.