Chapter 4

The crowd in front of the bulletin board was packed shoulder to shoulder.

The next day, the more detailed Redevelopment Buyout Compensation Plan had been posted.

The crowd was even thicker than the day before, and the air hung heavy with a restless mix of sweat, cigarette smoke and the smell of money.

Dennis was easily the center of attention. His voice was the loudest, and with a leather briefcase tucked under his arm, he carried himself like a self-appointed "buyout expert."

He had already run the numbers on his family's payout in his head more times than he could count.

"Ha! You see that?" He jabbed a finger at one line of the plan and bragged loudly to everyone around him. "My place is six hundred and fifty square feet. Under the top tier of this one-for-one replacement policy, that gets me two brand-new houses out in the suburbs, plus over a hundred grand in cash! I'm set for the rest of my life!"

Envious clucks of admiration and flattery rose all around him.

His vanity thoroughly fed, Dennis swept his gaze over the crowd. It quickly landed on Walter, who had been squeezed out to the edge and looked badly out of place.

Susan had dragged Walter down there by force.

His back, bent from years of hard living, looked so frail among the excited crowd.

As if he had found a new source of entertainment, Dennis deliberately raised his voice even higher.

"Hey, Walt, what are you even doing here, crowding in with the rest of us? Do you even have a property certificate for that junk attic of yours? How much floor space does it say? Don't tell me that when it's all over you won't even get moving money, and you'll have to hand the place over for free!"

The moment the words left his mouth, the crowd burst into open, roaring laughter.

"Yeah, Dennis is right. Attics don't count as floor space, do they?"

"He probably slapped that thing together himself back in the day. It's an illegal structure. They'll make him pay!"

The jeers stabbed at Walter and Susan like needles.

Susan's face flushed red, then went pale. She dug her fingers hard into Walter's arm and hissed, in a voice only the two of them could hear, "Walter, go! Go look and see for yourself! If we don't get an answer today, we're done!"

Under his wife's desperate stare and the neighbors' eager eyes waiting for a show, Walter moved like a condemned man walking to his execution. One step at a time, he struggled his way through to the very front of the crowd.

His eyes searched anxiously over the compensation plan, which was crammed with tiny, dense print.

His palms were slick with sweat, and his heart pounded as if it might leap out of his throat.

At last, he spotted the familiar words "Starling Court." But the compensation details after it were blank. There was only a note: "See supplementary provisions."

In an instant, his heart sank to the bottom.

It was over.

Just then, Dennis's laughter rang out again. "Ha! Look at that dumb face! He can't even find his own address. Guess his daydream's over!"

Walter refused to give up. His eyes raced down the page like a man gone mad, following the line all the way to the very bottom of the notice.

There, in small print that almost anyone would have overlooked, was a heading.

"Supplementary Resettlement Measures Concerning Historical Issues and Buildings with Special Property Rights."

This was it!

Walter's breath caught in his chest.

His eyes locked onto that short passage of supplementary text and would not let go.

Time seemed to freeze.

All the noise around him, Dennis's mockery, his wife's urging, the neighbors' chatter... every sound ebbed away like a receding tide. In his world, nothing remained but those few lines of print.

His hands, hands covered in calluses and scars from years of repairing appliances, began to shake violently.

The copy of the purchase contract he was clutching, which he had kept safe for twenty years and which had gone yellow and brittle, rattled and rustled in his grip.

His face, carved with deep lines by twenty years of wind, frost, rain and snow, drained of all color in an instant and turned ghostly pale.

Then a huge, indescribable surge of emotion erupted from deep inside him like a volcano. It sent a tremor through every limb and turned his legs to jelly, until he could barely stay on his feet.

Seeing the look on his face, Susan thought the worst had happened. Her heart plunged as if into ice water, and with a trembling hand she tugged at the hem of his shirt.

"Walt, what is it? What happened? Is it... is it that we don't qualify? We get... nothing at all?"

Walter turned his head slowly, very, very slowly.

He did not answer his wife.

He did not so much as glance at Dennis, who was still laughing smugly beside him.

His gaze passed through the whole noisy crowd, over the crumbling eaves, and came to rest on the narrow, steep staircase that led up to his family's attic.

It was as if he wanted to look back over those twenty years of hardship, grievance and perseverance one more time.

Then, without any warning, two streams of hot tears came pouring from the eyes of this man who had kept silent for twenty years.