The woman closed her eyes for a second, as though the sentence had gone into her somewhere and cost her something.

“Your mom,” she said, “is right.”

Then she came the rest of the way back and sat down in Row 14, in the seat I had just left, three rows behind her daughter — behind Maya.

We were only three rows apart now, she and I, separated by a silence that had far more in it than any argument could have held.

I have been in a great many silences in my life, and I have learned that they are not all the same substance.

There is the cold silence of two people who have stopped speaking in anger, which is a wall.