She still checks.

She will probably always check.

But she checks in the confident way of a person who expects the answer to be yes.

People sometimes ask me what the turning point was, and they want it to be the camera.

It is a good answer and it is not true.

The camera only recorded what was already happening.

It had been on that shelf for nineteen months, behind a row of paperbacks, running the whole time, in an apartment where a woman was being taught not to make a fuss and a child was being taught that saying no does not work.

The turning point was a woman in an urgent care on Nicollet who said, “That is not an overreaction,” to somebody who had spent four years being told she was one.

Everything after that was procedure.