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The point is dealing with it.

Dealing with what I did twenty-five years ago.

I daydreamed. That’s my big crime. A woman—a very important woman—died because I daydreamed and wandered where I shouldn’t have wandered, and sometimes, I wish I’d done something worse. I wish I’d been a horrible child whose horrific actions killed a person. At least that would have some meaning. I’d have been a monster who’d done a monstrous thing.

Instead, I’d been a child who’d done a childish thing. A simple thing that children do every day, wandering, lost in their thoughts, not paying attention, and if something bad happens—say they step into traffic—the only person hurt is them.

I didn’t step into traffic. I took a shortcut onto the college campus where my mom taught, and I didn’t notice that the yard where students hung out was completely empty. I didn’t notice the police cars because I came in another way. I didn’t know there was an active shooter on the grounds.

I had dance lessons a block away, and my friend’s mother forgot she was taking me home, too. It was fine. Mom worked on the campus. I’d go to her office and wait for her. I’d just won a lead spot in the dance recital, and I was dreaming of my big moment onstage, in my dress, swirling to the music.

The shooter saw me, this silly girl lost in her thoughts, wandering straight into his sights. And she saw me, too. The woman. Dr. Dabrowski, hunkered down in her office, picking that moment to peek out the window. She saw me, and she came running out, and he fired just as she knocked me to the ground.

Knocked me to the ground like Henry seemed to do earlier tonight.

Only he was fine. She was not.

I am responsible for her death. For the death of a scientist who was on the cusp of doing great things and never would because she was a good person who’d saved a child too hapless to protect herself.

What happens to a child who is responsible for that? I think what should happen is that the child goes on to do amazing things herself. The universe compensating for the loss of a great person. Every move I’ve made since, I have judged by that metric, consciously or unconsciously.

What am I doing with my life to justify Dr. Dabrowski’s sacrifice?

Not a damn thing.

My parents and all those therapists have told me I don’t need to compensate. Living is compensation enough. Being a good person is compensation enough. I’d almost reached the point of agreeing with them. And then …

Last month. A phone call. A journalist, who’d tracked me down because a Nobel Prize winner had thanked Dr. Dabrowski in his speech. Those words of thanks took the journalist to the story of Dr. Dabrowski’s heroic death and the little girl she saved. A girl who’d now be a grown woman.

Here was a story. A tragic and yet uplifting story. Let’s find that girl. See what she became.

Nothing.

I had become nothing.

After Dr. Dabrowski died, her wife tried to console me, telling me I’d go on to do great things, and Dr. Dabrowski had given me that chance. Maybe, at ten, those words should have washed over me, as gentle reassurance and kindness, nothing more. But I’d been in shock, and all I kept seeing was this woman, running from a doorway, knocking me down. And then the shot.

The shot, and her body convulsing, and then blood and gray specks on the sidewalk, and those specks were not pebbles. Even at ten, I knew they were not pebbles.

The woman wasn’t moving, and there was blood, and it was on her and on me, and all I wanted was to get out from under her. Out from under the body crushing mine, that body leaking blood and brains and not moving.

But when I tried to squirm out, someone barked from a window, “Don’t move!” and I thought I was in trouble. Like in those movies where the cops shout “Don’t move!”

I even put my hands on my head.

I lay there, under Dr. Dabrowski’s body, for nearly an hour. It seemed like so much longer. Trapped under the body of a dead woman, hands on my head, certain I was about to be arrested for killing her.

Because I had killed her, right?

Even when the shooter was dead and someone helped me out and they explained that Dr. Dabrowski had saved me, my mind didn’t truly shift from that core certainty. Maybe I didn’t shoot her, but I’d killed her all the same.

If I hadn’t wandered onto a lockdown scene, cheap headphones on, listening to Christina Aguilera as I daydreamed of a dance recital, Dr. Dabrowski—a remarkable woman, an important scientist—wouldn’t be dead.

So when her wife told me I would go on to do great things, ten-year-old Ellie didn’t hear reassurance; she heard obligation. To fully honor Dr. Dabrowski’s sacrifice, I had to do great things with my life. And, from that moment on, I was mired in the tar pit of expectation.

Nothing I ever did felt good enough. The degrees I pursued wouldn’t lead me to greatness, so I changed direction. The guys I dated wouldn’t give me a perfect marriage, so I ended the relationships. And then I was picking jobs and men based on potential rather than “do I actually want this position/person” and making spectacularly bad choices, all based on that faint whiff of promise that was really just the stink of desperation.

Sure, he’s an asshole who hits me when he’s been drinking, but he’s a brilliant scientist and maybe we’d have brilliant kids, who’ll make brilliant discoveries.