“No.”

He smiled at me then — a cold, calm, unhurried smile that chilled me all the way through, because there was no anger in it, only a serene certainty that he had found the lever that would make me bend.

“Then learn your lesson,” he said.

And he scanned his own boarding pass, and walked into the jet bridge, and took mine with him, held firmly in his hand, and did not look back.

I stood behind the glass partition and watched him go.

And here is the thing I did not do, the thing he was so sure I would do, the thing every previous version of me would have done.