The noise never stopped. Drills, engines, and men shouting into radios. The valley pulsed with it day and night. Walter Briggs had tried patience, phone calls, even the county office. None of it mattered. Every vibration rattled through his walls until even silence felt like something he’d imagined.
He told himself to endure it. To ignore the dust that settled on his porch, the lights that burned through his windows, the trucks that turned his fence into a target. He’d been through worse, he reminded himself. But he’d never had to watch his peace be stripped away like this.
That night, the lights from the construction site flooded his bedroom, and the steady hum of machinery kept him awake. He lay still, staring at the ceiling, feeling the weight of his years. He was too old for another fight, but too proud to give up what was his.