Lawyers, board members. He can’t hear the words, only the tone, and the tone tells him enough. Whatever’s happening in that house has nothing to do with fences. He spends the rest of the day rebuilding what he can. Post by post, board by board, the sun climbs, then falls.
And by six, he’s replaced nearly 40 ft of fence line. Each post set deep, each bracket tightened twice. That night, driving home, he almost mentions the cut marks to Harper again. He decides against it. She’s got enough weighing on her, and a man in dusty jeans telling a woman like her that someone’s sabotaging her property probably sounds like a stretch.
Still, the thought sits heavy in his chest the whole drive home. The next morning, David returns before seven, coffee in one hand, tools in the other, expecting to pick up where he left off. Instead, he finds an entirely new stretch of fence torn apart. Fresh damage, overnight damage. Twenty ft of freshly rebuilt fencing, ripped down again.
Wood scattered across the grass like it was thrown, not blown. He stands there, coffee forgotten in his hand, staring at the wreckage of work he finished less than 12 hours ago. Somebody came back. David sets his coffee down without drinking it and walks the length of the damage. Slow, careful, reading the ground the way another man might read a book.
Bootprints, deep ones, pressed into soft dirt near the treeine, leading away from the fence and toward an old service gate at the edge of the property. One so overgrown with vines that most people would forget it exists. He follows the prince until they vanish onto gravel. Whoever did this knew the property, knew where the cameras couldn’t reach, knew exactly which section to hit twice. Harper meets him near the main house an hour later, and this time she doesn’t rush past him.
Two black SUVs are parked in her driveway. Doors marked with a state seal David doesn’t recognize at first. “Inspectors,” she says before he can ask. “Someone filed anonymous complaints against my company. Safety violations, code failures, none of it’s true.”
“When did the complaints come in?” “Yesterday afternoon.” Her voice is tight, controlled, the voice of someone holding a wall up with both hands. “The same day my fence got torn apart for the second time.” David doesn’t say what he’s thinking.
He doesn’t have to. Harper’s already thinking it, too. The inspectors move through the property with clipboards and flashlights, checking wiring, checking structures, checking everything except the one thing sitting right in front of them. David watches one inspector walk past the sabotaged fence section twice without so much as glancing at the blade marks cut into the wood. That’s not an oversight.
Men who inspect for a living don’t miss straight lines. Later, alone near the tool shed, Harper finds him again. Her arms are crossed, her eyes rimmed with the kind of tired that makeup can’t fully hide. “Someone inside my company did this,” she says quietly, almost to herself. “Nobody outside knows this property well enough.”
“Not the cameras, not the gate code, not which section to hit twice.” “Who has access?” “Too many people.” She lets out a breath that shakes on the way out. “My operations director, my head of security, three board members, my own assistant.”