The quiet that followed was not hostile. It was simply quiet. Sandra and I passed each other at the mailboxes and exchanged the ordinary greetings of neighbors who live close and no longer visit. She asked once, in December, whether I had received a package of hers by mistake. I had not, and I said so, and she thanked me. That was the whole conversation. Distance, I learned that winter, does not have to be performed. It only has to be maintained, like a fence, by not opening a gate that no longer needs to be opened.
In January I wrote the letter I did not send. I wrote it at the kitchen table, on a Sunday evening, after a week in which I had thought more than usual about the seven months and about what I still wanted to say. The letter was not angry. It was not an apology, and it did not ask for one. It set out, in plain sentences, what the permission had been, what it had become, and why I had withdrawn it. It said that I had liked being a neighbor who could offer a pool on a summer afternoon, and that I had not liked discovering that the offer had been mistaken for a right. It said that I wished the ending had been simpler. It did not ask Sandra to agree with any of it.
I read the letter twice when I finished it. The first time, I read it as the person who had written it, and it sounded fair. The second time, I read it as the person who would receive it, and I understood something I had not understood while writing: Sandra would not hear fairness in it. She would hear a verdict, delivered months after the matter was settled, by a neighbor who had already won on paper. Sending it would not restore anything. It would only reopen a door I had spent a year learning to keep closed, and it would ask Sandra to walk through that door in order to be told, again, that she could not stay.
So I folded the letter, placed it in an envelope, and wrote Sandra's name and address on the front in my ordinary hand. Then I did not seal it. I opened the binder, turned to the back, behind the last tab, and filed the letter there, unsealed and unstamped, where it would remain part of the record without ever becoming part of the correspondence. I did not need it to be mailed in order for it to have done its work. Writing it had clarified what I thought. Filing it had decided what I would do. The difference between those two acts was the whole winter, in miniature: a feeling, acknowledged, and then put where it belonged.
That night I locked the back door and checked the gate from the kitchen window. The code was changed. The pool was covered. The letter was filed. Sandra was next door, living her life, and I was in my house, living mine. The finality of it did not feel like victory. It felt like a ledger page turned, the totals carried forward, and a new page begun with nothing owed on either side that paper could still collect.
Winter gave me time to do the accounting properly, and I did it the way I do all accounting: at the desk, with the receipts in front of me, in columns, without rounding anything up or down to suit a mood. The pool was covered and empty beneath its cover, and the yard was quiet, and the year behind me could finally be added up without new entries arriving to change the totals.
The money column was the simplest. The replastering had cost $4,800, quoted on September 2 by Aqua Design Solutions, and I had paid it from savings set aside for the house. The pump replacement was part of that same work, and its cost was folded into the same invoice, which I filed with the quote. Chemical costs during the seven months had roughly doubled, though I did not pretend to a precision the records would not support; Doug's invoices showed the quantities, and the quantities told the story plainly enough. The $24.99 jug of chlorine did not appear in my column at all, because it had not been my expense. I left it out without comment. A ledger is not an argument. It is a list, and lists are persuasive precisely because they do not argue.
The time column was longer. Seven months of daily logging, from March 3 to the September Saturday, each entry dated, each entry brief, each entry written in the evening when I would rather have been doing anything else. I counted the pages once, in December, and then stopped counting, because the number was less important than what the pages represented: evenings spent watching, noting, and filing instead of swimming. I had also spent hours that summer reorganizing the log into a case file, printing stills, checking dates against invoices, and answering Okafor's questions by telephone. None of that time was billable. None of it was recoverable. I wrote it down anyway, in hours estimated conservatively, because an accountant who will not record a loss has not understood what a loss is. I included the evenings spent checking the cameras and the mornings spent reviewing stills, since those hours were spent even though no invoice ever arrived for them.