Rachel called a licensed surveyor named Andrew Keene, whose receptionist promised a visit two days later.

She then emailed Carol a short request not to work on the disputed ground until the boundary could be checked.

Carol did not answer.

That evening, Lucy called from her apartment in Columbus.

She was twenty, attending community college, and usually began conversations by asking what her mother had eaten for dinner.

Rachel told her about the fence.

Lucy laughed at first, imagining a few inches of ordinary neighborly foolishness.

When Rachel turned her camera toward the boards, her laughter stopped.

“Mom, that’s where the bench used to be.”

Rachel looked at the empty place where her father’s old garden bench had stood.

Carol had moved it against Rachel’s garage without permission.

“I know,” Rachel said.

“I can still see the dents in the dirt.”

Before bed Rachel received a message from Carol.

It consisted of a photograph of an unsigned diagram and five words: “I suggest you leave this.”

Rachel enlarged the picture.

The line across the screen was straight, unlike the new fence.

More troubling, the image appeared to have been cropped just above a handwritten date.

Rachel saved the message rather than answering.

She did not yet know that the photograph was the first sign Carol had anticipated a challenge.

Andrew Keene arrived on Thursday in a dusty white truck with an assistant named Denise and enough surveying equipment to make the backyard resemble a modest construction site.

He greeted Carol politely when she came through her side gate, but he refused her offer to show him where the line ought to run.

“We establish boundaries from recorded descriptions and reliable monuments,” he said.

“A recent fence does not establish a boundary by itself.”

Carol watched him unpack a tripod as if he had insulted her family.

Rachel had taken the day off from her job at a pediatric dental practice.

Between appointments she normally spent her hours explaining treatments to nervous parents, which had given her a useful tolerance for people trying not to hear things.

She stood near the porch with copies of the deed, resisting the urge to hover over every measurement.

Andrew checked an iron monument by the sidewalk, compared recorded bearings, and asked Denise to examine the back corner near the creek easement.

Carol repeatedly claimed that the old fence had always been misplaced.

Andrew listened without agreeing.

Around noon, orange flags marked a line that ran almost six feet inside Carol’s new enclosure.