Marker Cap Match

Amina here. Thirty-two, house sitter, note writer, general menace. Maybe I should start with how I ended up watching a stranger's house on a dam in the first place, because it sounds crazy when I say it out loud.

Six months ago I matched with a guy online. Evan Pinkney, thirty-four. We talked every night for three weeks. Flirted hard, the kind of talking where you wake up grinning at your phone like an idiot. Then we did one video call, and halfway through it he got this weird look on his face and said he had to go check something. Never came back. Never texted. Nothing. Ghosted, clean through.

So when his listing popped up on the house sitting site, offering a free stay in exchange for feeding one extremely opinionated cat, I applied under a fake calm message and got it. The stay was a plain trade, cat care for a roof, and whatever happened between us would be separate from that. His listing said floating workshop on Ebenezer Dam, near Haenertsburg. Who owns a floating workshop? I had to know.

Turns out he'd be away the first weekend, at the neighborhood watch potluck barbecue, of all things. Which meant the house, the dam, the cat, and all his stuff, alone with me for two whole nights. Perfect opportunity to prove to myself he was a coward and I was over him.

Reader, I was not over him.

The workshop sits right on the water, moored to a little jetty, and the main room has this huge whiteboard wall covered in his handwriting. And here is the thing that broke me. Every marker sat in a row, and every cap was matched to its own marker by exact shade. Not close. Exact. The teal cap on the teal marker, the teal-green cap on the teal-green marker, sorted like a paint chart in a hardware shop. There was even a spare drawer of caps, arranged by gradient.

I sat on his desk chair and stared at that drawer for a solid ten minutes. Who does that? Who has a cap archive?

So I did what any normal adult would do. I found a pad of paper and left a note on the whiteboard ledge. It said, roughly: Dear Evan, your marker caps are matched by shade like they owe you money. You are a nerdy recluse who alphabetizes colors. Also your cat called me a subordinate being. Regards, the house sitter you ghosted. I signed it with a little drawing of a middle finger. Classy, I know.

Then I went to bed feeling fantastic about my life choices.

The next morning there was an email waiting from him. Subject line: RE: the caps. My stomach did a whole gymnastics routine. He'd found the note, photographed it, and emailed the photo to himself, apparently so he could respond properly. Which is exactly the kind of over-the-top thing I would do.

His email went like this. First, a full paragraph defending his color-coded cap archive. He called it an archive. He used the word twice. He explained that mismatched caps dry out the nibs, that the gradient drawer is for rotation scheduling, and that a man who keeps his tools in order is a man who can be trusted with larger things, which made me snort so loud the cat left the room. Then the second paragraph turned on me. He said I'd driven two hours out of my way to sit in the house of a man I claimed to hate, and that using spite to mask attraction was a bold strategy, and he hoped it was working out for me.

I read it three times. Fine, four.

The worst part, the genuinely worst part, was that he was funny. His ghosting had been infuriating, but his writing voice was the same voice I'd stayed up half the night for. And he'd ended the email with a line that said, if you're going to insult a man's caps, at least use his good markers, the ones in the second drawer.

I did not use his good markers. I used the worst one, the chewed green one, and I wrote my reply right on the whiteboard itself, big enough that he'd see it in any video call background for the rest of his natural life. It said: NIBS, EVAN? You ghosted a woman mid-sentence and your concern is NIB CONDITION? Recluse confirmed.

A couple of days passed while I actually house sat. The cat and I reached an uneasy truce involving sardines. And on my second sweep of the property I found the compost turner. It's a big drum on a frame you crank to mix the pile, and there, wedged in the gearing, was a chunk of hard green plastic. Part of the packaging, still embedded, the kind of thing he'd polished around and never noticed because he'd been too busy sorting caps by shade.

Oh, the joy. I taped a note right to the drum. It said: Enjoying your compost turner? Noticed this piece of plastic you forgot to remove. It's been grinding in the gears, big guy. Your precious tools, trusted with larger things. Love, your house sitter. P.S. I fixed it, you're welcome. Because I'm a good person, I actually worked the plastic free with a pair of pliers and oiled the gear, muttering the whole time.

That evening my phone buzzed. A text from a number I'd deleted months ago but never forgot, because I have the memory of a vindictive elephant. It was a photo of Evan standing in front of the compost turner, holding up the removed plastic chunk like it was a fish he had caught, grinning at the camera. He was taller than I remembered from the call, and he had that messy hair situation going on, and the caption was a single winking emoji. Just the one. Like that was a whole conversation.

I texted back a thumbs down. Then I texted, and how did you even get my number. He replied, the barbecue committee has a directory, ask me how I know. I asked how he knew. He said, I checked it twice hoping you'd signed up for the potluck. Which was either smooth or pathetic and I genuinely could not tell which, and that uncertainty is basically the story of my entire feelings situation with this man.

The barbecue was that Saturday. He'd be fifty meters away from me at the neighbors' the whole evening, and I'd be here with the cat, pretending I wasn't going to walk past the jetty just to see if I could hear him laughing over the fence.

Diary entry, Thursday night, because apparently I keep a diary now, like a person in a film.

Reread his email again tonight. Three times was the official count, but let's be honest, it was more. It's sitting there in my inbox, a bright open window, and I keep walking past it. The man matched his marker caps by exact shade and then had the nerve to be funny in an email, and the further nerve to be right about the spite thing, which is the part that makes me want to throw my phone in the dam.

He fixed the compost turner photo thing so fast. He wanted me to see him holding that plastic chunk. He wanted me looking at his face. And the winking emoji, one single winking emoji, has been living in my head rent free all evening, doing renovations.