Sometimes the best payback isn’t loud or dramatic. It’s quiet, clever, and parked right where it needs to be.
My grandparents, Clarence and Harriet, had spent more than forty years in their small hillside home—a place full of memories. The oak tree my great-grandparents planted, the wind chimes that never stopped singing, the garden Harriet tended every summer. And right next to them? A steep, empty lot no one ever bothered with.
Until the bulldozers arrived.
Harriet called me that afternoon, voice steady but shaken.
“Ellis, they’re cutting into the hill. And part of it is ours.”
I thought maybe it was a misunderstanding. But when Clarence returned from the doctor and walked outside, he found a carved-up section of their yard—a freshly scraped switchback driveway leading to the neighboring lot. And it wasn’t even close to the property line. It was inside it.
Clarence tried to keep calm. He asked the excavator operator for a plot map.
“Not my call,” the worker said. “Talk to the owner.” He handed over a business card with a scribbled name: Desmond.
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