The next morning, Mara arrived with a copy of a newly filed civil complaint.
Karen had signed it before the attack on my porch.
The complaint accused me of repeated intimidation and demanded an emergency order restricting my use of the front yard.
I stared at the filing date.
Karen had prepared her legal accusation before she staged the event that was supposed to support it.
Mara pointed to a paragraph describing a violent confrontation that had supposedly occurred on Thursday evening.
The complaint had been electronically submitted on Thursday afternoon.
The timing was impossible.
I looked at Mara.
She said the discrepancy was significant but would need to be presented carefully.
I asked whether the court would see the original submission record.
She said it would.
I felt the first small movement of relief since the brick hit my kitchen window.
Karen had wanted me to lose control in front of a camera.
Instead, she had put her own plan into a document with a timestamp.
And the person who had signed that document was about to discover that a quiet man could still fight back.
The clerk at the courthouse handed Mara a certified copy of the filing history the following morning.
The record showed that Karen had uploaded the complaint hours before the confrontation on my porch.
It also showed that she had revised the document after deputies arrived at my house.
Mara studied the two versions at her desk while I watched rain crawl down the office windows.
The original complaint described an assault that had not yet occurred.
The revised complaint changed the time of the alleged assault but left the surrounding paragraphs untouched.
Karen had tried to repair her timeline without removing the evidence of her original plan.
Mara told me that an inconsistent document was not an automatic victory.
A judge would want to hear testimony and examine the supporting records.
I understood her caution because my old work had taught me the difference between a suspicious detail and a proven fact.
We arranged the security footage, witness statements, repair invoices, and filing records in chronological order.
Mara asked me to keep every description factual and to avoid assigning motives that the evidence could not establish.
I agreed without hesitation.
The truth had already become complicated enough without my imagination making it worse.
When I returned home, Sophie was sitting at the kitchen table with her college application open on her laptop.
