The neighborhood I live in doesn’t look dangerous.
That’s the scam.
On a sunny day it looks like a postcard: mature maples arching over streets, houses with character, front porches with hanging plants, kids on scooters rolling down gentle inclines until they hit a cross street and bail out laughing. People wave. Dog walkers chat. Everybody acts like the earth beneath them is solid and permanent.
But the ground here is a negotiated truce.
We sit on a series of steep, rolling hills carved decades ago for single-family homes. The city sold “views” and “privacy.” The builders sold “charm.” What they didn’t sell—what they couldn’t fit on the brochure—was the invisible backbone that makes the whole place possible: retaining walls, terraced cuts, drainage corridors, tiebacks anchored into bedrock.
In this neighborhood, you don’t own a yard so much as you rent it from physics.
My lot sits on the high side of a steep slope. My garage and driveway are perched on a compacted shelf of soil that drops off hard behind my backyard. Immediately below me was a property that had been empty for two years after the elderly owner passed away. The house sat there with curtains drawn, mailbox stuffed, weeds pushing through cracks in the driveway like nature was trying to repossess it slowly.
And between my yard and that empty lot was the wall.
It wasn’t decorative. It wasn’t charming. It was a three-foot-thick reinforced concrete retaining wall, poured in the 1970s, stained with decades of rain and moss. It looked like a bunker relic—ugly, blunt, unapologetic.
But it held back roughly twenty feet of soil.
Twenty feet of soil that supported my driveway.
My garage.
A chunk of my backyard.
The wall wasn’t a feature. It was a survival organ.
I knew that because when I bought the house years ago, I’d paid for a structural inspection and a geotechnical review. The inspector had pointed at the wall and said, “That’s your insurance policy. Don’t touch it.”
He’d used the phrase mass wasting, like he was talking about an inevitable disaster and not a quiet suburban hill.
He’d told me about the winter of 1996—an “atmospheric river” event before that phrase was common—when half the neighborhood’s slopes turned into mudslides. A few walls failed. Two houses had foundation shifts. One backyard became a crater.
“People think soil is inert,” he’d said. “It’s not. It’s a liquid waiting for enough water.”
I remembered that line every time I looked at the wall. It made me appreciate the ugly thing the way you appreciate brakes or seatbelts—only when you need them do you realize they’re the reason you’re alive.
Then the empty house sold.
That’s when Brad arrived.
Brad showed up in early spring with a leased G-Wagon and a swagger that belonged in a sales seminar.
You know the type: sunglasses even when the sky is overcast, phone always in hand, expensive shoes that have never met actual dirt. He didn’t move in to live. He moved in to flip. It was obvious from the first day because he didn’t walk the property like someone imagining where to put a grill—he paced like someone calculating dollar signs.
He had contractors coming and going within a week. Dumpsters. Demo crews. The house below me lit up at night with work lights and the sound of nail guns.
I didn’t mind construction. It’s a city. People improve their homes.
What I minded was the way Brad talked about the hillside like it was a design choice instead of a load-bearing system.
I first met him while I was gardening near the property line—trimming back a stubborn rosemary bush that refused to die no matter how I abused it. I heard footsteps on the other side of the wall and looked up to see Brad standing there with his hands on his hips, staring at the concrete.
“Hey, buddy,” he said, like we’d already shared beers. No introduction. No “I’m Brad.” Just buddy.
He pointed at the wall like it personally offended him.
“I’m gonna have my guys knock that thing down next week,” he said. “We’re flattening the slope. Infinity pool, deck, modern vibe. Just letting you know so you don’t freak out about the noise.”
I laughed—one reflexive bark—because for a second my brain refused to accept he was serious.
“You can’t knock that down,” I said. “That wall holds up my driveway.”
Brad rolled his eyes. It was a signature move. I would see it a hundred times after that, always right before he dismissed facts he didn’t like.
“Relax,” he said. “My contractor says it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” I said. “That’s a retaining wall. Structural. It’s tied into bedrock. You need a geotechnical engineer and permits.”
Brad snorted. “I don’t need permits for landscaping on my own property.”
“That’s not landscaping,” I said, keeping my tone calm on purpose. “If you touch that wall without shoring, you’ll destabilize the slope.”
He leaned in slightly, like he was about to teach me something.
“Listen,” Brad said. “I paid cash for this place. It’s mine. I’m not asking permission. I’m letting you know.”
And then he turned and walked away, already tapping on his phone like the conversation was over.
I stood there staring at the wall, suddenly feeling a cold clarity settle in.
Brad wasn’t ignorant in the normal way.
He was ignorant with confidence.
That’s the most dangerous kind.
That night I called the city building department.
I expected the call to be dramatic. I expected someone to say, “Oh my God, he can’t do that.” I expected the machine of government to roar to life and protect the hillside like it was a public safety issue.
Instead I got a woman named Diane who sounded like she’d been screamed at by three different homeowners before lunch.
“If he’s removing a retaining wall,” I said, “he needs permits and engineering. It affects my property.”
A sigh. Papers rustling.
“Technically,” Diane said, “we can’t preemptively stop work unless we observe unpermitted structural work. If he claims it’s landscaping, it gets tricky.”
“He literally told me he’s knocking down a retaining wall.”
“I understand,” she said, and her tone suggested she understood in the way a lifeguard understands that people keep trying to drown. “We can send an inspector sometime next week.”
“Next week?” I repeated.
“We’re short staffed,” she said. “I’ll put in the request.”
I hung up and stood in my kitchen staring at the rain-streaked window.
In a neighborhood built on invisible engineering, the system depended on people not being stupid.
And Brad was already proving the weak link.
So I did what homeowners do when they realize the city moves slower than disaster:
I started building my own paper trail.
I called Mike.
Mike was a structural engineer I’d worked with years earlier when I was dealing with a small foundation crack that turned into a giant anxiety spiral. He was competent, blunt, and allergic to BS.
He came out the next morning with a laser level and a clipboard. He walked my driveway, tapped the wall, measured slope angles, and stared down at Brad’s lot for a long time without speaking.
Finally he said, “That wall is doing a lot more than Brad thinks.”
“That’s what I told him.”
Mike gave me a look. “Of course you did.”
He asked where Brad planned to “flatten.” I pointed. Mike made a low sound in his throat, the sound of a man watching someone light a fuse.
“If he removes that without a replacement structure and proper drainage,” Mike said, “you’ll get soil shear. Especially if we get an atmospheric river.”
“Which we do,” I said. “Every year now.”
Mike nodded. “Yep.”
He wrote me a report. Not a casual email. An actual stamped engineering statement with explicit language:
Retaining wall is structural and critical for stability of upper property. Removal without engineered replacement and shoring will likely cause slope failure and property damage.
I paid him out of pocket and didn’t blink at the number because some costs are cheaper than losing your house.
Then I took photos.
Not a few. Hundreds.
I photographed the wall from every angle. I photographed the soil above it. The cracks in my driveway. The baseline condition of my yard. I put a ruler next to existing hairline cracks like a forensic tech. I timestamped everything and backed it up to cloud storage.
My neighbor across the street, Mrs. Hernandez, saw me with my camera and asked what I was doing.
When I told her, she made the sign of the cross.
“Oh honey,” she said. “We had a slide back in ’96. My cousin’s garage moved two feet. That man below you is about to learn something.”
“Can you do me a favor?” I asked.
“Anything.”
“If you see construction, take pictures.”
Mrs. Hernandez nodded like I’d enlisted her in a neighborhood war.
That afternoon, I walked down to Brad’s house and tried one last normal conversation.
I knocked. He opened the door with his phone pressed to his ear, held up a finger like wait, then ended the call with an exaggerated sigh.
“What?” he asked.
I held out Mike’s report. “This is from a licensed structural engineer. The wall is load-bearing. If you remove it, you risk catastrophic slope failure. You’ll be liable for damages.”
Brad stared at the paper for exactly two seconds, then smirked.
“Cool,” he said. “I’ll have my guy look at it.”
“Brad—”
He stepped closer. “Listen, buddy. I get that you’re nervous. Old neighborhood, old people, everyone’s afraid of change.”
“I’m not afraid of change,” I said. “I’m afraid of gravity.”
Brad laughed like that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard.
“Have a great day,” he said, and shut the door.
I stood on his porch for a moment, report in hand, feeling the last thread of reasonable optimism snap.
Brad wasn’t going to listen.
So I shifted from persuasion to preparation.
I sent Brad a certified letter that night, attaching the engineer report and stating explicitly that he had been warned and any damage would be his responsibility.
I copied the city.
I copied my insurance.
I started a folder on my computer called BRAD like I was preparing for trial.
Because I was.
Two days later, the heavy machinery arrived.
Not a professional excavation crew with survey stakes and a foreman holding permits.
A rented excavator rattling like a shopping cart with an engine. Two guys in reflective vests that still had fold creases. No hard hats. No cones. No silt fencing. No signs.
And a jackhammer.
They started at 7:12 a.m.
The first strike against the concrete sounded like a gunshot.
I ran outside with my report in hand and yelled over the noise, “Stop! That wall is structural!”
The crew barely looked at me. One of them shrugged like he didn’t get paid enough to care.
Brad stormed out of his back door in a hoodie and designer joggers, hair messy like he’d just rolled out of bed.
“Get off my property!” he shouted.
“I’m on my property,” I shouted back, and held the report up like a shield. “Read this! You are liable!”
Brad marched up to the line, grabbed the report out of my hand, and ripped it in half.
Then he ripped it again.
Paper fluttered down like dead leaves.
I stared at the pieces, stunned by the childishness of it. A grown man tearing an engineering report like it was a bad receipt.
Brad pointed at me with the torn paper still in his hand.
“I’m calling the cops for trespassing,” he snapped. “Back up.”
Then he turned and waved at the crew.
“Keep going,” he ordered.
The jackhammer struck again.
That was the moment I stopped talking.
Not because I was afraid.
Because I understood: Brad wanted conflict he could frame as “neighbor drama.” If I kept yelling, he could tell the city, tell his lawyer, tell anyone who would listen that I was a hysterical homeowner interfering with his improvements.
So I walked back up to my deck.
I set up a lawn chair.
I mounted my tripod.
I aimed my HD camera directly at the construction zone and pressed record.
If Brad was going to destroy my hillside support, I was going to document him doing it in crystal clarity.
When my wife stepped outside with coffee, she saw the camera and raised her eyebrows.
“Is this what we’re doing now?” she asked.
“It’s what we have to do,” I said.
She watched Brad’s crew hammering concrete.
Then she said, quietly, “That man is going to get someone killed.”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to say yes out loud.
By the end of the week, the wall was gone.
Not “partially removed.” Not “modified.”
Gone.
The slope below looked naked and wrong, like exposed tissue.
Brad immediately started building his deck framing. Pressure-treated lumber. Posts sunk into soil like toothpicks. He dug a giant pit for the pool and left it open like a wound.
One afternoon I watched him stand in the pit, phone to his ear, talking about “infinity edge aesthetics.” He sounded thrilled.
He never once looked up at the hill above him like it was capable of movement.
I called my insurance company again and told them the wall was gone.
My agent went silent.
“He removed it with no replacement?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you have proof you warned him?”
“Oh,” I said. “I have proof.”
I sent her the video. The certified letter receipt. Mike’s report. Photos. The clip of Brad ripping the report.
She called me back an hour later sounding horrified.
“Please tell me you’re not exaggerating when you say your driveway depends on that wall.”
“I’m not exaggerating,” I said.
There was a pause.
Then she said, “Document everything. And if it rains hard, get out.”
I stared at the phone after the call ended, the words get out echoing.
Because I knew our weather forecast.
I knew what was coming.
The weather started talking about it on Monday.
Not casual rain. Not “showers.”
They used the phrase atmospheric river, which is meteorologist-speak for: the sky is about to dump an ocean on you.
My wife and I put sandbags near our garage just in case. I placed crack monitors on the driveway—little plastic gauges you can buy online to track movement. I took baseline readings.
I emailed the city again. I attached everything. I used words like imminent hazard and structural failure because bureaucracy responds faster when you speak its language.
No response.
Tuesday night, the rain arrived.
It hit the roof with a fury that sounded personal. Gutters overflowed. Water ran down the hillside in sheets.
I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed listening to the sound of water and thinking about soil turning from solid to slurry one molecule at a time.
At 1:47 a.m., my phone buzzed with an alert: Flood Watch Extended.
At 2:03 a.m., I heard the sound that changed everything.
Not a crash.
A deep, groaning thud—like the ground itself shifted its weight.
Then snapping wood.
My wife sat bolt upright. “What was that?”
I was already out of bed, grabbing a flashlight and sprinting down the hall.
At the back window, Brad’s floodlights lit up his yard like a stage.
And I watched the hill begin to move.
The smooth slope he’d carved was gone—replaced by flowing mud. Soil liquefying, sliding downward with momentum that built like a freight train.
It slammed into his deck framing and shattered it like matchsticks.
The mud surged into the pool pit and filled it instantly, but the pressure didn’t stop.
It pressed against his foundation.
I swung my flashlight toward my own yard and felt my stomach drop: the edge where the wall used to be had sheared off. A jagged slice of my backyard had disappeared. A fresh crack appeared across my driveway—straight and ugly, like the earth drawing a line.
But my house held. The bedrock was higher up on my side. The slide took loose fill, not my foundation.
Brad’s house, however, was in the direct path of the momentum.
I saw him burst out in a bathrobe, screaming into his phone, knee-deep in mud, waving a shovel like he could negotiate with physics.
Then, as if the hillside wanted to make a point, the second slide happened.
A massive chunk of earth detached—ten tons, maybe more—and moved slowly, almost majestically, until it plowed straight through his sliding glass doors.
Mud and rock poured into his open-concept living room.
Furniture vanished under brown sludge. The sound was wet, heavy, final.
Brad screamed.
And for the first time since I met him, he sounded like a man who understood he was not in control.
Twenty minutes later, emergency lights painted the neighborhood red and blue.
Firefighters arrived. City crews arrived. A police officer knocked on my front door and ordered us to evacuate temporarily until they could assess stability.
I stood in the rain with a few neighbors, watching Brad try to argue with a firefighter while his house became an indoor swamp.
Mrs. Hernandez showed up beside me in a raincoat and whispered, “Told you.”
I didn’t feel triumph.
I felt sick.
Because even when you’re right, watching a landslide devour a home is terrifying. It’s a reminder that the ground you trust is only stable because of unseen work—and when people remove that work, the earth collects its debt.
The next morning, the rain stopped like it had finished its job.
The sun came out bright and cruel, illuminating the damage in daylight.
Brad’s house was filled with four feet of mud. The back patio supports were sheared off. The pool pit was a brown pond.
And the real kicker: the pressure from the slide had pushed against his foundation hard enough to shift the structure off its slab.
The city inspector—finally, the one scheduled for “next week”—showed up and took one look before red-tagging the property.
UNSAFE FOR HABITATION.
Brad stared at the red tag like it was a personal insult.
He tried to talk his way out of it. He tried to blame the rain. He tried to blame “unexpected soil conditions.”
The inspector pointed at the missing retaining wall and said, “No permit. No engineer. No shoring. This is on you.”
Brad’s face did something strange then—his jaw working, his eyes darting like he was running numbers in his head and watching them all turn negative.
And that’s when I learned something about guys like Brad:
They don’t feel remorse when they break things.
They feel rage when consequences cost money.
The morning after the slide, the neighborhood looked like it had been through a quiet war.
The sky was absurdly blue—one of those post-storm mornings where sunlight feels like an insult. Steam rose off wet cedar fences. Water dripped from eaves in slow, steady ticks. Birds went right back to chirping like the world hadn’t shifted a few inches in the night.
But the slope below my backyard looked flayed.
Where Brad had carved that “clean modern grade,” there was now a raw, torn scar of mud and rock. His deck framing was splintered. The pool pit had become a brown lagoon. And through the shattered sliding glass doors, I could see his living room filled with mud up to the base of his kitchen island.
His house—open concept, staged-to-sell, full of light wood and white quartz—looked like someone had poured a river through it.
The fire department had cleared us to return around 9 a.m., but they warned us not to use our driveway until an engineer could assess the crack. My wife and I walked the property line with boots on, stepping carefully like the ground might move again if we breathed wrong.
The crack in my driveway was real—fresh, dark, and long. It ran parallel to the street, about five feet from the edge where the wall used to be. The plastic crack gauge I’d installed the day before had shifted by a hair. Not catastrophic, but enough to make my stomach drop.
I called Mike before I even made coffee.
He arrived around 11 with a hard hat and the expression of a man who hates being right.
He crouched by the crack, measured it, then walked to the edge of my yard and looked down at the mess below.
“Well,” he said, straightening up. “Your house is still on bedrock. That’s why you’re standing here.”
“That’s the good news,” I said.
Mike’s mouth tightened. “The bad news is you’ve lost passive support. You’re going to need a replacement retaining structure ASAP. The soil will keep creeping every time we get heavy rain.”
“How fast is ASAP?” my wife asked.
Mike didn’t soften it. “If we get another storm like last night before you stabilize, you could lose more of the slope. Maybe not the whole garage, but… you’ll get movement.”
Then he looked down at Brad’s property again and shook his head slowly.
“That guy built a pool pit at the toe of a slope,” he muttered. “Without a wall. Without drainage. He basically excavated the brakes off the hill.”
He wrote another report on-site—updated, post-failure. Clear language about the wall being removed, the resulting slide, and the urgent need for stabilization on my side.
I emailed it to my insurance company within an hour.
My agent called me back, voice tight. “We’re opening a claim,” she said. “And we’re putting his insurance on notice.”
“His insurance already denied him,” I said.
There was a pause. “They denied him for his damage,” she clarified. “They might still be liable for yours if he had coverage. But if he was operating as an unlicensed contractor or committing intentional illegal acts, they may deny everything.”
“So Brad pays,” I said.
“Brad should pay,” she corrected gently. “But we’ll see if Brad has anything left to pay with.”
That line stuck with me, because it hinted at the ugly truth underneath every lawsuit: winning on paper is easy. Collecting is the hard part.
Brad didn’t speak to me that day.
He didn’t come to the property line and say, I’m sorry. I messed up. I didn’t understand.
He didn’t even come over and ask if my driveway was okay.
He stayed in his driveway, yelling at people on the phone, pointing at the hillside like it had betrayed him.
A city inspector arrived around noon and red-tagged his house again in front of him—big bright notice on his front door like a scarlet letter.
Brad argued, of course.
“This is bullshit,” he shouted. “It’s a natural disaster!”
The inspector didn’t blink. “You removed a structural retaining wall without permits.”
“It was landscaping!”
The inspector pointed down at the mud. “Landscaping doesn’t send ten tons of soil through your sliding glass doors.”
Then the inspector turned toward my property.
He walked my driveway, looked at the crack, and said, “You need to submit a stabilization plan.”
“Me?” I said, incredulous.
He nodded. “You own the upper lot. Even though he caused it, the city’s concern is safety. If your slope fails and your garage slides into the street, that’s public hazard. You’ll need a geotechnical engineer.”
I felt anger flare—hot, irrational. Of course the city wanted me to spend money fixing what Brad broke.
But Mike’s report echoed in my head: You lost passive support.
So I swallowed it.
“Okay,” I said.
The inspector handed me a card and told me which department to contact for an emergency hillside stabilization permit. He said the words “temporary shoring” and “public right-of-way safety” like they were normal homeowner concerns.
Then he walked away and left me staring at my cracked driveway like it had suddenly become my responsibility to keep the earth in place.
That’s when my wife said quietly, “We’re going to get sued.”
I looked at her. “By Brad?”
She nodded. “People like him don’t apologize. They retaliate.”
She was right.
We didn’t even have to wait twenty-four hours.
Brad’s first shot came as a “friendly visit.”
The next afternoon, while I was on my deck talking to Mike about potential wall designs, Brad showed up at the property line in a clean hoodie and designer sneakers that had no business being that close to mud.
He tried to smile like we were neighbors chatting about weather.
“Hey,” he said. “Rough night.”
I didn’t respond.
Brad cleared his throat. “Look, I know you’re probably stressed. But… these things happen. Hills shift.”
Mike’s head snapped up. He looked at Brad like he was looking at a raccoon that had wandered into traffic.
Brad continued, “I talked to a guy who says your property is technically the source of the soil. So liability might be… complicated.”
My wife made a low sound in her throat.
Mike said, flatly, “Your removal of the retaining structure triggered failure.”
Brad waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah, yeah, you’re the engineer. I get it. But lawyers don’t care about feelings.”
Then he looked directly at me and said, “We should work something out.”
The phrase sounded reasonable until you heard the subtext.
I crossed my arms. “What do you mean?”
Brad lowered his voice slightly, like we were conspiring.
“You’ve got footage, right?” he said. “You were filming.”
My stomach tightened. “And?”
“If you hand over copies to the city, to insurance, whatever, it’s gonna make this… worse,” Brad said carefully. “But if you keep it private, we can all move on.”
Mike actually laughed. A short, incredulous burst.
Brad ignored him. He looked at me. “I’ll take care of your driveway crack. I’ll pay for some patching. Maybe even a new section. And you… you don’t share the video. Fair?”
My wife stepped forward. “You want to pay for a patch on his driveway after you destabilized the hill?”
Brad’s smile hardened. “Ma’am, I’m trying to be generous.”
That word—generous—made my vision blur with anger.
But I kept my voice even. “No.”
Brad’s jaw flexed. “Think about it.”
“I already did,” I said. “No.”
His eyes narrowed, and the friendly mask slipped for the first time.
“You know,” he said, voice low, “people with your kind of house… you probably don’t want a long legal fight.”
Then he turned and walked away, leaving that threat hanging in the air like exhaust.
Mike looked at me and said, “He just tried to bribe you.”
“I know.”
My wife’s voice was tight. “And when bribery doesn’t work?”
“We find out what he does next,” I said.
What Brad did next was exactly what my wife predicted.
He didn’t come back with an apology.
He came back with a lawyer.
Three days after the slide, a process server walked up my driveway and handed me papers like he was offering a menu.
Brad was suing me for $500,000.
Claim: my property collapsed onto his, causing damage and emotional distress.
I stood on my driveway, holding the lawsuit, staring at the words like they were written in a different language.
My wife leaned over my shoulder. “He’s blaming you.”
“He’s blaming gravity,” I said, voice flat. “But sure.”
I called my attorney that afternoon.
His name was Evan Price—sharp, calm, the kind of guy who didn’t get dramatic because he’d seen too many people panic over paperwork.
When he read the complaint, he chuckled.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was stupid.
“This is a bluff,” Evan said. “He’s trying to scare you into settling or sharing costs.”
“What about the city ordering me to stabilize?” I asked.
Evan’s tone shifted. “That’s the practical problem. Even if he caused it, you still have to protect your property. We’ll pursue him for reimbursement. But first—did you document everything?”
I glanced at my camera, still on the tripod on the deck.
Evan sighed with relief like I’d just told him oxygen existed. “Good. Keep it. Don’t edit. Don’t cut. Keep raw files. We’re going to need a clean timeline.”
“Timeline?” my wife echoed.
“Oh yes,” Evan said. “We’re going to build a timeline so crisp the judge can taste it.”
I liked Evan immediately.
That same week, my insurance company sent an adjuster to evaluate my driveway crack and slope loss. He took measurements, photos, and frowned so hard it looked like his forehead wanted to fold in half.
“This isn’t cosmetic,” he said. “This is slope instability.”
“You’re telling me,” I replied.
He told me insurance would likely cover emergency stabilization and driveway repairs, then pursue subrogation—meaning they’d try to recover costs from Brad.
I asked the question my agent hinted at earlier. “What if Brad can’t pay?”
The adjuster shrugged. “Then your carrier eats some of it. Or puts liens. Or sues. We go where the money is.”
Brad’s money, I thought, was probably tied up in leased vehicles and bad decisions.
But we had to stabilize regardless.
Mike recommended a geotechnical firm. I hired them. They arrived with drilling equipment and started soil borings along my backyard edge like we were preparing for a space launch.
The geotech lead—Dr. Lena Morales—stood near my fence line and looked down at Brad’s ruined yard.
“This was a classic toe-cut failure,” she said.
I blinked. “A what?”
She pointed downward. “You remove the retaining wall—your toe support. Then you excavate for a pool—more toe removal. Then you add water—storm. The soil loses shear strength. It moves.”
She glanced at my driveway crack. “You got lucky because your structure is anchored to bedrock. But you still need a new wall. And drainage.”
“Drainage?” my wife asked.
Dr. Morales nodded. “Water is the weapon here. A well-designed wall needs weep holes, back drains, proper backfill. Brad didn’t just remove your wall. He removed your drainage system too.”
Every word she said sounded like a bill.
She gave us two options:
-
Emergency shoring now—steel soldier piles and temporary lagging to prevent further movement—then design and build a permanent engineered wall.
Pray for a dry season and gamble.
We didn’t gamble.
We paid for emergency shoring.
Watching a crew drill into bedrock and install steel piles in my backyard was surreal. They worked fast, serious, professional. The cost was not small, but it felt like buying time. Buying safety.
Brad watched from his destroyed property like a man watching someone else rebuild what he broke.
He didn’t wave. He didn’t speak.
He just stared.
Brad’s lawsuit didn’t last long.
Evan filed our response and counterclaim with a kind of joy I’ve rarely seen outside of people finding surprise money in a coat pocket.
Our counterclaim was simple: gross negligence, unpermitted structural demolition, damage to my property, and the cost of stabilization.
We attached exhibits.
Exhibit A: Mike’s engineer report, dated before demolition.
Exhibit B: certified letter showing Brad received it.
Exhibit C: city building code excerpts requiring permits for retaining wall removal.
Exhibit D: my photos.
Exhibit E: the video.
And the video was… brutal.
Because it wasn’t just Brad’s crew destroying concrete.
It was Brad tearing up the engineer’s report on camera.
It was Brad dismissing warnings.
It was Brad ordering the crew to continue.
When Brad’s attorney—some high-priced guy in a crisp suit—requested discovery, Evan didn’t argue.
He handed him a hard drive.
“You asked for it,” Evan said, calm as prayer.
Two weeks later, we sat for depositions.
Brad looked different.
No suit. No swagger. He wore a wrinkled button-down and jeans like he’d slept in them. His eyes were bloodshot. His hands kept fidgeting under the table.
His attorney started aggressive anyway, because that’s what litigators do when they’re trying to salvage a sinking ship.
“Your soil destroyed my client’s home,” the attorney said, voice sharp. “You failed to maintain your hillside—”
Evan didn’t respond.
He opened his laptop and pressed play.
The deposition room filled with my voice from the video:
“That wall is load-bearing. If you remove it, my driveway could come down.”
Then Brad’s voice, smug: “It’s my property. I’ll do what I want.”
Then the report tearing.
Then the jackhammer.
Then another clip—my camera capturing the slope after the wall removal, showing exposed soil, no shoring, no drainage, Brad standing there like a proud idiot.
Brad’s attorney stopped talking.
His face shifted, subtle at first—confusion, then dread, then anger aimed sideways.
He glanced at Brad like, you did not tell me this existed.
Evan paused the video and slid the original engineer report across the table. The one Brad had ripped, reassembled and scanned, with Mike’s stamp and signature clear.
“This report,” Evan said, “predated excavation. It warned of catastrophic slope failure. My client provided it. Your client destroyed it. We have that on video.”
Brad’s attorney picked up the report, read the first paragraph, and the color drained from his face.
He leaned toward Brad and whispered something I couldn’t fully hear, but I caught enough:
“…gross negligence… you didn’t tell me…”
Brad stared down at the table like he wanted it to swallow him.
Evan continued, voice steady. “Your claim that my client’s soil caused this is nonsense. The soil was stable for decades because of the wall. Your client removed the stabilizing structure. He caused the failure.”
Brad’s attorney sat back, silent now, and I saw in his expression the moment a lawyer realizes he’s representing a man who lied to him and handed him a losing case.
The deposition ended early.
A week later, Brad’s lawsuit was withdrawn.
And then the letters started.
Brad’s insurance: Claim denied due to intentional illegal acts and failure to adhere to building codes.
Brad’s lender: notices. Warnings. Demands.
Brad’s contractor—if you could call rented equipment guys “contractors”—ghosted him.
Brad’s “flip” became a crater full of mud and liability.
Meanwhile, my stabilization bills arrived.
Emergency shoring.
Geotech assessment.
Engineering design.
Temporary drainage modifications.
Driveway repair estimates.
My insurance covered a portion, but not all of it—because insurance loves phrases like “maintenance” and “pre-existing.”
But the big piece? The new permanent retaining wall.
That was necessary, and it was expensive.
Evan smiled when he saw the numbers.
“Good,” he said. “This makes our damages strong.”
“How do we collect?” I asked.
Evan’s smile sharpened. “Liens. Court orders. Forced sale if we have to. He doesn’t get to walk away from a hillside he destabilized.”
Brad tried one last tactic before the financial reality crushed him.
He tried to scare me.
One evening, about a month after the slide, I came home and found a note tucked under my windshield wiper.
No signature. Just a message scrawled in block letters:
YOU’RE GOING TO REGRET THIS.
My wife stared at it and said, “Call the police.”
Evan told me not to waste time with police unless there was a direct threat of violence.
“Document it,” he said. “Everything goes in the file.”
So I did.
I installed motion lights along my fence line. Security cameras. Not because I wanted a war, but because I refused to be blindsided by someone who treated consequences like a personal attack.
Brad never showed up to vandalize anything. He didn’t need to.
The hill did enough damage for him.
Within two months, he was bleeding money. Mortgage on a red-tagged house. Costs to remove mud. Costs to stabilize. Legal fees.
Then came the final punch: the city issued him a compliance order.
He had to restore slope stability—meaning he had to build a proper engineered retaining structure.
Not “optional.” Not “aesthetic.”
Mandatory.
And because his actions had affected my property, the city required coordination between both lots, meaning he couldn’t just slap up a cheap block wall and call it done.
He needed geotech. He needed permits. He needed real crews.
And he didn’t have the money.
I found out through Evan that Brad tried to refinance and couldn’t. Tried to sell and couldn’t. No buyer wants a red-tagged house with active landslide history unless it’s practically free.
Brad’s lender started foreclosure proceedings.
When I heard that, I didn’t cheer.
I didn’t gloat.
I just felt that quiet satisfaction you get when the universe finally applies a rule consistently.
You remove support structures, you fall.
It’s that simple.
The auction date came faster than I expected.
Evan called me. “There’s a window here.”
“A window for what?” I asked.
He didn’t answer immediately. He waited until I said it myself.
“To buy it,” I said.
Evan’s voice was calm. “If you buy the lower lot, you control the engineering. You eliminate future idiots. And you can stabilize your property permanently without negotiating with someone else.”
My wife raised her eyebrows when I told her.
“You want to buy the mud pit?”
“I want to buy safety,” I said.
We ran the numbers. Insurance payout. My savings. A small line of credit. The cost of building the new wall.
It was scary.
But it was also strategic.
Because if I didn’t buy it, someone else might—another flipper, another Brad—and I’d be back in the same fight again, just with a new face.
So I went to the auction.
It was held in a county building downtown. A small room full of quiet, sharp-eyed people who looked like they’d been born knowing how to bid on distressed property.
Brad wasn’t there.
Of course he wasn’t.
He was probably in a rented apartment somewhere trying to convince himself this wasn’t his fault.
The bidding started low. Nobody wanted it. The liability scared them.
That was my advantage.
I bought the lot for a fraction of what Brad paid.
When the auctioneer banged the gavel and said “Sold,” my wife squeezed my hand so hard it hurt.
“Are we insane?” she whispered.
I stared straight ahead and said, “Maybe.”
But then I thought about my garage.
My driveway crack.
The sense of vulnerability that came from knowing someone else’s stupidity could take my home.
And I knew this was the right kind of insane.
The next six months were not cinematic.
They were engineering.
Permits. Plans. Soil reports. Drainage design. Contractor bids. City inspections.
I learned more about hillside stabilization than I ever wanted to know.
We hired Dr. Morales’s firm to design the new retaining wall system. Not just a wall—an integrated structure: reinforced concrete with tie-backs anchored into bedrock, proper backfill, drainage matting, weep holes, and a French drain system that redirected water safely.
Mike oversaw structural integration on my side—ensuring my driveway support was restored and my crack was repaired properly, not just patched.
We hired a real crew—union guys with hard hats, survey stakes, and a foreman who actually respected the ground he was working on.
The foreman, a big guy named Hank, walked the site and said, “Whoever took out the old wall should be slapped with a textbook.”
“That would be Brad,” I said.
Hank snorted. “Figures.”
We demolished Brad’s shattered deck remains. We cleared mud from what used to be his living room. The house was unsalvageable. Too much shift. Too much damage. The city required full remediation.
It was surreal watching the place come apart—walls stripped, framing exposed, everything that had been “modern open concept” reduced to studs and debris.
Not because I felt sorry for the house.
But because it felt like watching someone’s arrogance get disassembled piece by piece.
When the new wall pour happened, I stood on my deck with coffee and watched concrete flow into forms like gray lava.
It was beautiful in a strange way.
Not because it looked pretty, but because it meant stability. It meant the hill was being asked to hold itself correctly again.
Once the wall cured and inspections passed, we regraded the slope properly and planted ground cover designed to reduce erosion. We built terraces.
My wife had an idea.
“If we’re doing all this,” she said, “can we make it… something we actually enjoy looking at?”
So instead of rebuilding Brad’s fantasy—pool, deck, “modern vibes”—we built a massive terrace garden.
Raised beds. Stone paths. Native shrubs. A row of cherry trees that would bloom like fireworks in spring.
We didn’t try to fight the hill anymore. We worked with it.
When it was done, the view from my kitchen window changed completely.
No ugly mossy wall.
No vacant lot.
No Brad with a jackhammer.
Just stable terraces and green growth.
And the crack gauge on my driveway?
It stopped moving.
The plastic lines held steady month after month. The repaired section remained clean. No new fractures. No creeping.
My garage stayed exactly where it belonged.
For the first time since Brad arrived, I breathed easily.
Brad tried to resurface once, months later.
He sent an email to Evan’s office asking for “a reasonable settlement.”
Evan forwarded it to me with a single line:
He wants mercy now.
I stared at it for a long time.
Part of me wanted to respond with something sharp.
Another part of me felt… nothing.
Because the truth was, the hill had already given Brad the lesson.
No email could undo it.
Evan handled the remaining legal cleanup. My insurance pursued subrogation. We obtained judgments. Liens attached. Whatever assets Brad had left—after his lender, after the city fines, after the contractors—were carved up.
I didn’t become rich off it.
But I didn’t go broke either.
I ended where I started: wanting my home stable.
Wanting my life not dictated by someone else’s stupidity.
Now, when I’m outside pruning the cherry trees, I sometimes think about Brad. Not in a vengeful way. More like in a way you think about a cautionary tale you once lived through.
I heard he moved back into an apartment downtown.
I hope he doesn’t have a balcony.
He never did seem to understand how support structures work.
And in a hillside neighborhood like ours, that’s the difference between a view… and a disaster.
THE END
