My husband Roy planted the garden in the summer of 1997. He never asked whether I wanted one. He simply came home with a truck full of topsoil and red and yellow flowers, then spent the entire Saturday creating a pattern that looked casual from the street but was carefully designed. Those were the colors he had brought me every anniversary since we met. Roy died in 2011, but I kept the garden exactly as he had made it, replanting the same colors every spring. It was inexpensive, but its meaning was impossible to measure.

Then Kyle Hauser came home from college. His father had money, and Kyle had grown accustomed to doing whatever he wanted without consequences. One September afternoon, he came around the corner too fast on his motorcycle and cut straight across my lawn. His back tire tore through Roy’s garden, crushing several flowers and destroying part of the pattern. When I confronted him, he looked at the damage, shrugged, and said, “It’s just grass and flowers. They’ll grow back.” He walked away without apologizing. I went inside, opened the folder where I had been documenting his behavior since June, and made a decision.