I had thought of everything.

I had built a fortress of preparation around my two children and my own frayed nerves.

And then we walked down the aisle to Row 11, and there was a woman sitting in my seat, and my whole fortress came down in about four seconds.

I keep coming back, when I tell this, to the carrier — the soft blue baby carrier my mother gave me before she died, the one Leo was sleeping in against my chest through all of it.

She had given it to me when I was pregnant with him, already sick herself by then, already thinner than she should have been, and she had made a small joke as she handed it over about how a carrier keeps your hands free for the ten thousand other things a mother has to do at once.

She did not live to meet him.