“I was mad,” she said.

“But I wasn’t scared.”

And that hurt my heart a little, if I am honest, because a ten-year-old girl should not yet have had cause to learn the difference between anger and fear, to have felt them both clearly enough to tell them apart and report which one it had been.

She should not have needed to know that on an airplane, at ten, next to a stranger.

But she did know it, and she had known which was which, and there was something in the steadiness of how she said it that told me she was going to be all right — better than all right — in a world that was going to test her again.

I wrapped my free arm around her, careful of Leo, and she leaned her head on my shoulder for just a moment, and in that moment she was a little girl again, my little girl, tired and leaning on her mother, and not the calm, straight-backed person who had quieted a whole cabin with a wallet and a sentence.