The letters came for a while, forwarded through the airline and the academy, from people who had been on the flight and wanted her to know what the night had meant to them, and she read all of them and answered the ones that asked for an answer, and she did not keep most of them, because she had never wanted to be a shrine.

But one she kept.

It came in a child’s careful hand, from a girl who had been eleven years old in row 6 on the night over the Atlantic, and it was short, and Maya read it standing at her kitchen counter with the afternoon light coming in, and had to set it down and pick it up again.

I was the girl in row 6, the letter said.

When everybody was scared and nobody knew what was happening, you walked up the aisle to go to the cockpit, and you looked at me and my mom, and you nodded at us.