A stranger took the seat I’d paid extra for, laughed at me holding my six-week-old, and told a flight attendant she refused to move. They put me three rows behind my ten-year-old.

The man in the windbreaker in Row 9 said it out loud, to nobody:

“Forty weeks a year. I’ve been moved twice. I never once thought to ask why.”

Then she turned to my daughter.

And she crouched down in the aisle, in uniform, in front of a ten-year-old in a window seat, and said:

“What’s your name?”

“Maya.”

“Maya. How did you know what that badge was?”

“I read the page. When Mom booked. It said non-rev standby can’t displace a revenue passenger.” Maya was going red. “I was going to tell her at boarding. I saw the lanyard under her leg. But she said don’t start.”

Delphine looked at the lanyard.

Then she stood up, and she did the thing I have replayed a hundred times since.

She keyed the cabin PA.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your purser speaking. I’d like to correct something that happened during boarding, because it happened in front of all of you and I’d rather not leave it standing.”