For a moment the sunlight, the pool, and Brenda’s furious breathing all seemed to exist very far away.

I had spent seven years making sure this day would not come in my backyard.

Then Brenda had walked through my gate with a police officer and forced it into the open.

My name is Nora Ellis, and I was forty-one that summer.

I earned my living repairing antique books and teaching preservation classes at the public library, which hardly qualified me as someone equipped to fight a woman who believed every fence and sidewalk existed for her approval.

My house stood on the last quiet bend of Briar Lane in Bellwether, a suburb outside Atlanta where people waved from driveways and remembered other people’s children long after those children moved away.

The pool was rectangular, older than the house’s current kitchen, and surrounded by uneven blue slate that had been patched more times than I could count.

I bought the home eight years earlier from a woman named Evelyn Hale, who had become one of my closest friends.

Evelyn was Mark’s mother.

She was also the mother of Mara Hale, whose name most residents remembered only because of a fading photograph inside the county recreation center.

Mara had drowned during a summer flood in 1998 after trying to help a younger boy reach a dry stairway near the old municipal pool.

The boy survived.

Mara did not.

Evelyn had never told the story as though her daughter were a flawless angel.

She remembered a stubborn girl who hated itchy sweaters, loved peach ice cream, and argued with anyone who claimed girls could not become lifeguards.

She also remembered officials who dismissed warnings about the rec center’s broken emergency gate before the flood.

She had spent two decades trying to make sure a frightened child would never again find a locked gate between water and safety.

She eventually sold her home to me at an ordinary market price, but the pool and its safety education program remained subject to a separate trust agreement that she had helped create.

The trust owned the training equipment, reserved limited access to the pool for supervised rescue classes, and held a recorded interest that required notice before certain changes to the grounds.

It did not make the pool public property.

It certainly did not authorize a neighbor to take my keys.

I was the trust’s acting trustee after Evelyn retired from active administration and moved to live with her sister in Vermont.