To my horror, it mattered very much.

I remembered now. This was what happened when other people got their hands on the things I loved—my eyes inevitably became their eyes. I would see everything from outside myself, from a distant perspective, and whatever I had loved would be ruined. I would see that it was not what I had imagined at all, and it never had been. It never would be again, either. Not as long as others laid eyes on it. Their mere existence took it away from me.

Was there nothing in this world that couldn’t be mine alone?

I ran at him, a move that had worked for me before and seemed to come naturally. Surprising him totally, I took him to the ground. He struggled but I was bigger, and I ripped the camera off his neck. I stood up and steadied myself, and then, using the long strap like a sling, whipped the camera into the dirt that was still hard from frost. It exploded, pieces of it bouncing in all directions. I stomped on what was left for good measure, crushing the lens with my heel.

Some of the others in the group had rushed toward us, and I could tell they were contemplating coming to his rescue, but a look from me stopped them. The broken camera hung from the strap in my hands, shards of glass or plastic clinging to what was left of the lens, and I was prepared to use it. They stood a few yards behind their leader, who was crab-crawling away from me, looking ashen. “Do you know how much that cost?!” he squeaked out.

I could now see that they were not carrying weapons—it was sound or camera equipment. A boom mic?

What did they think they were going to do out here?

“You’re gonna pay for that!” the twerp on the ground shouted. With some swaying he finally got back on his feet. “You’re gonna pay for that!” he repeated.

I took a big step forward and shoved him. “Get out of here! I have a gun! I’ll call the police!” I gestured toward all of them. “Trespassers!”

He staggered back, blinking and bending over, his hands on his knees as he caught his breath. He was looking at me again, and I saw something click in his face. His eyebrows lifted. “Hey, you’re the lady, the one from—” Straightening, he finished his sentence. “You won the lottery, right? The woman who was in that robbery?” He said the name of my hometown. “At a market?”

He was looking away from me now and toward the sky, as if plucking the memory out of the air. “A family was shot. And you were . . .” His eyes fixed on me again and I watched him doing the mental math, calculating the events he assumed added up to the creature who stood before him. “Scheele’s Market?”

“Get off my property, you fucking asshole,” I said, his words shrinking me down into one tiny, shuddering locus, my imagination forsaking me. The past rushed back at me like a fist, the force of it taking my breath away, stinging my eyes. This is all I was to him, to every one of them. A girl who was raped in a news story, who won money. An object of pity. Of contempt.