Land was everything to Max. He had fallen in love with this land the moment he laid eyes on it, and he loved every square inch of it. He had purchased old man Anson’s seven hundred acres at the end of Cove Road for the sole purpose of preventing development and to preserve the quality of life that he and his neighbors enjoyed.

The historical village and the gardens had been afterthoughts. He had used perhaps twenty-five acres of pasture-land to create a historical settlement, true to the original settlers, the Covingtons, who had arrived in the late 1800s. Hannah’s beautiful gardens occupied a mere five acres. Not a tree had been cut. One single lane meandered across the rolling hillside from Cove Road to the historical site, and that would soon be lined with flowering white dogwoods. Six hundred and seventy-five acres of lush, green, forested hillsides rose one thousand feet above Covington, as pristine as on the day he had purchased them.

To maintain the integrity of Cove Road with its fine old farmhouses, they had saved and restored the old Anson homestead, gutted the interior, and used it as their offices. They had refurbished the exterior of the old, falling-down farmhouse to its original gleaming white clapboard. As they had in the past, rocking chairs on the porch welcomed visitors.

Max saw himself as a preserver in shining armor; he saw his son as Darth Vader, a destroyer. Zachary’s plea fell on deaf ears. Twenty acres were to Max as five hundred acres, ten houses the equivalent of a hundred. Father and son were a million miles apart.

Max fixed his eyes on Zachary’s heaving chest, on his red, sweaty face, and felt only contempt and dislike. “I’ve spent my entire life preserving this land from developers, and now you want me to hand it over to you, to bulldozers and graders? Are you insane? The answer is no, and that is final.”

“You’re the fool around here and the crazy one,” Zachary screamed. Veins in his neck pulsed. “How can I turn your precious Cove Road into a Loring Valley with twenty acres? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said about my plan, about you setting the rules, and you don’t want to. Well, I’ll say it again. Ten houses, one house on every two acres, a nice place, perhaps designed as replicas of farmhouses with porches like Bob’s place. How come it’s all right for the ladies to build not one, but two cottages, for Bob and now for Amelia’s so-called family, on their land right here on Cove Road across from you? How come that doesn’t desecrate your ideal concept of holding back time, keeping everything as it was fifty years ago?”