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.

Then she said, “A feeding tube.”

“Yes.”

“Under the seat. Where I put my backpack.”

“Yes.”

And my daughter, twelve at that point, put her head down on the kitchen table for a minute, and then sat up and said the thing that told me she was going to be all right in a specific way that has nothing to do with school.

“Number four was right,” she said.

“Number four was right, baby.”

Maya is thirteen now.

She still reads everything.

It’s not a quirk anymore; it’s who she is, and the airline thing gave her a word for it that she uses about herself with total seriousness.

“I check.”

That’s her whole self-description.

She’s on the debate team, which surprised nobody, and last year she did a piece for a school competition about the flight, and she ended it with a line I asked her permission to write down.