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.

Leo slept through it.

Maya sat back down and put her seatbelt on, because the sign was still lit, because she reads everything.

PART 4

I got my seat back.

Not 11A — Bonnie had to be moved, and moving her to Row 14 while my daughter and I sat together in 11 was, Delphine said, “operationally the cleanest solution and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t also the correct one.”

So the woman who’d said the girl is big enough spent two hours and ten minutes in a middle seat three rows behind us, and I sat with my daughter, and Leo slept the whole way, and I did not once look back.

Maya did.

Once.

About an hour in, she turned around and looked over the headrest, and then she sat back down and was quiet for a while, and then she said:

“Mom. Should I feel bad?”