Chapter 1 : One second the pool deck was a wall of noise — cicadas, a radio playing something with too much bass, kids screaming through the chain-link, the flat slap of wet feet on hot concrete — and the next second all of it went thin, like somebod

Ramona Vega felt the sting before she understood it. A bright, flat pain across her right cheek, hot and then hotter, spreading up into her eye socket. Her sunglasses were gone. She heard them skitter across the concrete somewhere to her left and stop.

Her head had turned on its own. She hadn't told it to. When it came back level, Dale Brandt was standing over her the way he'd been standing over her for the last four minutes, except now his right hand was at his own hip, fingers spread, and his mouth was open.

"SQUATTERS don't get to swim in MY pool," he said.

Not a question. Not even really aimed at her. Aimed at the deck. At the forty-odd neighbors in swimsuits and cover-ups and flip-flops who had all, every one of them, stopped moving.

Ramona sat very still on the folding chair she had pulled out of the rack herself eleven minutes earlier. Her tote bag was at her feet. The strap was still looped around her left wrist. Her right hand was open on her thigh, exactly where it had been when he swung.

She did not touch her face. She had learned a long time ago that touching your face tells a crowd how much it hurt.

Two feet behind Dale, Delia Pruitt stood frozen mid-sip of a canned seltzer, sunglasses pushed up on her head, phone already up in her right hand. The phone was not pointed at the pool. It was pointed at Ramona.

Dale's left arm was clamped across the metal clipboard and the fine ledger, holding both against his ribs like a man carrying groceries in the rain. His chest was out. His jaw was set. He was waiting for her to do the thing they always did — cry, or leave, or say *I'm sorry, I didn't know*, and then the deck could go back to being a Saturday.

Ramona did none of those things.

She looked at the badge on the concrete. It had slid past the drain grate and stopped flat, the plastic lanyard trailing behind it like a dead snake. A little girl in pink floaties — maybe six, maybe seven — had walked three steps away from her mother to watch it slide, and now she was standing there with her mouth open, staring at the badge, then at Ramona's face, then back at the badge.

The girl's mother pulled her back by the wrist. Nobody said anything.

"You hear me?" Dale said. He shifted the clipboard up higher, like a professor about to start a lecture. "You want to tell these people why you're on my deck?"

"I've been on this deck since before you were president," Ramona said. Her voice came out level. She was surprised by it. Her cheek was throbbing in time with her heartbeat, but her voice was fine.

"Fourteen years," Dale said, turning to the deck, playing to it. "Fourteen years and not one payment receipt. Not one. You know how many people in this subdivision pay their dues every quarter? Every one. Every single one. Except one."

"Unit fourteen," somebody said from the shade of the clubhouse awning. Ramona didn't turn to see who.

"Unit fourteen," Dale agreed. "Fourteen years of it. She's not even a member. She's a — " He stopped himself, straightened his polo, and said the word anyway, quieter, which somehow made it worse. "She's a squatter."

The deck made a sound. Not a gasp. That would be too generous. It was a low, soft noise, the sound of forty people deciding, at the same time, not to be the one who disagreed.

Ramona looked past Dale to the girl with floaties. Then to the kid sitting on the edge of the pool with his legs in the water, who had been about to jump in and hadn't. Then to the woman on the lounge chair at the far end, mid-fifties, sun hat, paperback face-down on her chest — Ramona could not remember her name, but she had waved to her every morning for years, and now that woman was studying her paperback like it was a legal document.

Fourteen years. Ramona had moved back into her mother's house the week after the funeral, when the estate lawyer handed her a folder and said *this is all of it*. She had been paying the rent-to-own line every month since, automatic withdrawal, same date, same amount her mother had set up in 1994. She had replaced the water heater. She had painted the trim. She had fixed the fence that Dale Brandt himself had complained about in 2019, before he'd ever been president, back when he was just the guy on the corner who kept his trash cans out an extra day.