I stood at the edge of that backyard and watched my daughter place herself, deliberately, at the very center of a photograph, and I had to look away for a moment so that no one would see me cry.

Because of everything, that small act contained the whole distance my daughter had traveled.

For sixteen years, Maya’s relationship with the camera had been one of flight.

The camera was the enemy, the thing that captured and exposed and preserved the marks she spent her life hiding, and she had developed, out of that fear, a whole choreography of escape: the slide to the edge of the frame, the turn away, the last-second retreat out of the shot entirely.

She had spent her childhood fleeing the lens.