The man at the gas station was the thread I pulled. When I asked him where he’d heard it, he told me Marlene had spent weeks telling anyone who would listen that her grandparents once owned my two acres and that a city outsider had bought it out from under her family through a crooked deal. It was a good story. It was also entirely invented. I went back to the county, and this time I did not ask about my line. I asked about hers. Marlene’s family had never owned a single foot of that land. The parcel she claimed her grandparents lost had belonged, for sixty years, to the Ellery family, the same Mr. Ellery who sold me the house and walked me to every stake.

That was the piece that ended it. Mr. Ellery was seventy-nine and still living twenty minutes away, and when I told him what was being said in town, he did something I did not expect. He came to the diner on a Saturday morning, sat down among the people who had gone quiet when I walked in, and told them plainly that his family had held that ground since 1961, that no one named Marlene’s grandparents had ever owned it, and that the woman spreading the story had knocked on his door two months earlier trying to get him to say otherwise. He had refused. She had told the town he agreed.