The house sits on a corner lot and it has been yellow since long before the newlyweds arrived. They started with remarks, then demands, then the police and the city, both of whom told them there was no rule I was breaking. They sued. It was thrown out and they paid my legal fees. Then they went door to door trying to raise an HOA to force me to repaint, and the street told them where to go, and after that almost nobody spoke to them at all.

Then I went away for three weeks, and I came back to a grey house and nearly drove past my own driveway. The man across the road had photographed the whole job and had called the police while it was happening, but the crew had a signed work order and a paid invoice, so there was nothing to stop.

My revenge was paperwork. I requested the work order through the painting company’s office, and the signature on it was not mine, and the billing address was theirs. That is forgery and criminal mischief, and I filed for both, and I filed a civil claim for the cost of restoration.

They settled before it reached a courtroom. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars, which covered stripping the grey, priming, and two coats of the original yellow, matched from a chip I had kept in a kitchen drawer since 1998, because my father mixed that colour himself the summer he bought the place.

They moved out that autumn. A retired couple lives there now and the wife brings me tomatoes.

The street threw a repainting party the weekend it was finished. Fourteen people, folding chairs, someone’s terrible potato salad. The man who took the photographs made a short speech that embarrassed everybody including him.

I have thought a lot about why it mattered so much. It was never really the colour. It was two people deciding that something of mine was theirs to correct, and assuming I was small enough to accept it. The house is yellow again. It is loud, and it is mine, and I have stopped apologising for taking up space on this corner.