“I can stay here.”

“No, sweetheart.”

“Really.

I can.” She looked up at me, and there was something in her face I could not quite read — not fear, which was what I had braced for, but something steadier and more deliberate, something that looked almost like a decision.

The flight attendant seized on it gratefully, promising again that she would check on Maya throughout the flight, that it was only a few rows, that it would all be fine.

And the woman in my seat rearranged her coat with a small, satisfied motion and a smirk that she did not bother to hide, the smirk of a person who has won something, though what exactly she imagined she had won by bullying a tired mother out of a seat she paid for, I could not tell you.