“To remember today.”

I watched my daughter pick it up with both hands, the way children hold something they have understood to be precious, and turn it over, studying both faces of it.

She did not fully grasp what it was.

But she grasped that a captain had given it to her, and that it had to do with the way everyone on the plane had looked at her father, and that it was hers to keep.

And I thought: this is what she will remember.

Not the man at the gate who decided we didn’t matter.