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They believed the story began with their view and ended with my loss. It didn’t. It began decades earlier, with my grandfather’s pen on an easement that gave passage, not permission to erase what grew on our side of the line. While they boasted about legality, I read the fine print they’d never bothered to see. Grief steadied my hand where fury might have shaken it. I didn’t answer their arrogance with shouting; I answered it with distance measured in detours and fuel receipts. The road they’d treated as theirs folded quietly back into mine.
