PART 3
Here’s what most people don’t understand about “revenge,” and what I understood after thirty years of watching it play out in courtrooms:
The best revenge isn’t loud. It’s correct.
Blake and Tiffany wanted a fight. They wanted me to scream, to key their car, to throw paint on their house in return — something they could then call the police about, something that would make me the aggressor, something that would finally, after two years, let them be the victims they so desperately wanted to be.
I gave them nothing to work with.
Instead, my attorney sent them a very calm, very professional letter.
It laid out, in plain terms, that they had authorized and paid for unpermitted alterations to a property they did not own; that this constituted trespass to property and civil damage; that they were liable for the full cost of restoring my house to its original color and condition, plus the damage to my landscaping, plus my legal costs, plus — and this was the part that made them call me screaming — potential punitive damages, because a court tends to take a dim view of people who paint someone’s house against their will after two years of documented harassment.
Because that was the other thing.
Two years of documented harassment.
The police reports they’d filed against me — all closed as unfounded. The lawsuit they’d lost. The HOA attempt the neighborhood had shut down. Every one of those was a paper trail, and every one of those established a pattern, and a pattern is the difference between “a neighbor dispute” and “a documented campaign of harassment culminating in the unauthorized alteration of the victim’s property.”
I hadn’t kept quiet for two years because I was weak.
I’d kept quiet for two years because I was building a file.
Every time they called the police on me and were told I’d done nothing wrong, that was evidence.
Every time they sued and lost, that was evidence.
I’d been the calm, reasonable, harmless yellow-house lady the entire time, and they’d been the aggressors on record, over and over, for two years, and they’d been too consumed by their hatred of a color to notice that they were building my case for me.
Blake called me the day they got the letter.
“You can’t be serious,” he shouted. “We improved your property! Gray is a normal color! We did you a favor!”
“Blake,” I said, calm as a Sunday. “Did you own my house when you painted it?”
Silence.
“Did I give you permission to paint my house?”
Silence.
“Then you didn’t do me a favor. You committed a civil trespass, in writing, after two years of harassment I have fully documented. My attorney’s letter is generous. If you’d like to fight it, we can let a judge decide how generous, and I’ll warn you — I spent thirty years watching judges decide exactly this kind of thing, and they do not like your kind of defendant.
Or you can pay to restore my house, cover my costs, and we can be done.
You have ten days.”
