“Who is Chloe?”

I could not answer him.

My throat had filled with broken glass.

And in that silence, with the cabin cheering and my son’s small broken question hanging in the air and the drawing sticking up out of his backpack, something happened in me that I can only describe as a switch being thrown — the terror and shock and grief that had frozen me were simply overridden, all at once, by something older and stronger and entirely without fear: the animal certainty of a mother whose child has just been hurt in front of her.

I did not decide to move.