Chapter 2

I thought one padlock would be enough to make Bianca back off.

I underestimated how shameless she was.

The next morning I opened my door and got hit with a wave of sour garbage.

Two bags of kitchen trash were sitting on my brand-new wicker sofa, the one that had cost me five thousand dollars. The bags had split open, and the liquid had soaked all the way through the cushions. On top of that, somebody had spray-painted one word across my gate in red.

SPINSTER.

I was shaking. I took photos of everything and went straight to the management office.

The property manager was a guy named Dale, somewhere in his forties, with a belly hanging over his belt. He listened to me, took a sip of his coffee, and then finally spoke up with a smile pasted on his face.

"Elodie, I heard about all this. Look, Bianca can be a little hotheaded. But calling the cops in front of her kid yesterday? That was pretty harsh."

"Her son destroyed my flowers. She dumped garbage in my yard and painted that on my gate." I stared at him. "I pay three hundred and ten dollars a month in HOA dues. Are you going to do something or not?"

Dale sighed and leaned in, lowering his voice.

"Elodie, let me be straight with you. Bianca's husband is Preston. He's vice president of our board, and he's a regional director over at Ardmore. He knows a lot of people. You're a single woman who just moved in. There's no sense picking a fight with them. Do yourself a favor. I'll have maintenance clear out the trash, and you take a nice box of cookies over there and smooth things out with Bianca. Then we can put this whole thing behind us."

"You want me to apologize to her?" I thought I'd heard him wrong. "Dale, you want me to apologize to the woman who threw garbage in my yard?"

"Come on, it takes two, you know. Why isn't she going after anybody else? Why just you? Think about it. Maybe you didn't start off on the right foot with your neighbors."

He waved a hand at me, already done with the conversation.

I laughed at that and walked out.

People like Dale only care about making a problem disappear. I was better off relying on myself.

I'd been a compliance auditor for four years. I'm not good at much, but I know how to work a process.

That afternoon I nailed a sign to my gate. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. A lawyer friend told me that once that sign was up, Bianca walking in wasn't a neighbor dispute anymore. It was criminal trespassing.

Then I wrote up a cease and desist letter from a template, signed it, and sent it certified mail. I also filled out the HOA's official complaint form line by line and uploaded everything with it. Photos, the survey, my closing documents. All of it.

I stuck the mailing receipt on the fridge. I figured that had to get me some kind of answer.

Two days later, the letter came back.

She'd signed for it, torn it up, and shoved the pieces through the gap under my door. Her signature was still legible on one of them.

As for the complaint form, I never heard a word.

That night I opened the community's Facebook group and found the whole thing on fire.

Bianca had written an entire essay about me. She said I'd been bullying a mom raising a kid on her own. She said I screamed at her son in front of her until he cried. She said there was something wrong with me, that I had a problem with children. In the last paragraph she wrote that I was some man's mistress, that I had no family of my own, and that was why I couldn't stand seeing a happy one.

There were dozens of replies under it, and every single one of them showed up to set me straight.

Marla, who lives three doors down: "Young people these days have no heart at all. Who picks a fight with a little boy? That yard is sitting there empty anyway. Would it kill her to let him run around?"

Nadine: "Exactly. We're all neighbors, we help each other out. She's blowing this way out of proportion. Honey, don't burn your bridges. You have to see these people every single day."

Someone tagged me directly: "@Elodie Bellamy come apologize to Bianca and Bentley already. Don't drag this whole community down with you."

I scrolled through the comments, and my stomach kept turning over.

Did they not know the truth? Of course they knew. But Bianca's husband was vice president of the board and a regional director at Ardmore, and I was a single woman with nobody behind me. Stepping on me to stay on the right side of power didn't cost them a thing.

I didn't reply to any of it. I just quietly took screenshots of the entire thread and saved them.

Two days after that, a letter from the HOA showed up.

I thought it was the response to my complaint.

It was a violation notice.

Violation: installing a lock and signage on a common-area structure without board approval.

Required action: two hundred and fifty dollar fine. Remove both within seven days. Daily penalties after that.

At the bottom, on the line for the issuing officer, was a name. Preston Ashcombe.

I put the sign up. I put the lock on. Both of them on land I'd paid eighty thousand dollars extra to own.

And the man signing off on my fine was her husband.

I had barely set the notice down when I heard a bang behind me.

The big sliding door in my living room cracked from the middle all the way out to the frame.

A rock the size of my fist had come through the glass and rolled to a stop by my foot.

Outside, Bentley was standing in my yard, clapping and laughing.

"Kill the witch! Kill the witch!"