Those exact words. She’ll grow into it. Which is a sentence I have said about school shoes, and about a winter coat, and about a bicycle, perhaps four hundred times in thirteen years of being a mother, and which is correct about every single one of those things.

The chair was an eighteen-inch seat.

Maya Lin needs fifteen and a half.

And the reason that matters — the reason that is not a quibble, the reason a professional would have taken the chair off her on sight — is the thing I am going to spend an entire part on later, because it is the actual subject of this story and almost nobody who shared the warm version of it on social media knows it.

Two and a half inches.