Chapter 4: No Blind Spot
After the officers left, Marjorie remained at the intersection.
Daniel started to walk home, but she stopped him.
“How long has that camera been there?”
Daniel turned.
“I don’t know.”
“You never noticed it?”
“Sure. I just never had a reason to worry about it.”
Marjorie looked up again.
The camera seemed smaller from the ground than it had when she first noticed it.
Yet it had seen everything.
She walked a few steps along the sidewalk and looked toward the community center.
There was another security camera mounted near the entrance.
Then she noticed a doorbell camera on a nearby house.
Her expression changed.
“How many cameras are there?”
Daniel gave a tired shrug.
“Probably more than either of us knows.”
Marjorie stared down the street.
The intersection suddenly looked different.
For months, she had thought of public spaces in terms of what she could see. If nobody stood nearby, she assumed nobody knew what she was doing.
But the absence of people had never meant the absence of observation.
Daniel watched her.
“You thought you had a blind spot.”
Marjorie did not respond.
He continued.
“You weren’t in one.”
She looked back at the broken dummy mirror.
“I thought nobody would care.”
Daniel’s expression softened slightly.
“People care when their property gets damaged.”
Marjorie looked toward the genuine traffic mirror.
It remained completely intact.
That mattered, too.
She had spent so much energy insisting that she was protecting the neighborhood that she had almost ignored the simplest fact of all: she had damaged something that was not hers to destroy.
The camera had not created that fact.
It had only recorded it.
