The video never went viral. I have, out of curiosity, searched for it on TikTok and Instagram every few weeks. It does not appear to have been posted anywhere. I suspect — and this is speculation — that by the time the woman in the cream sweater got back to wherever she was going, she had watched the footage and realized it did not tell the story she thought it told. Maybe she tried to post it and got too much pushback. Maybe she never tried. I do not know. I do know that eleven months later, I am a person who still checks, when a stranger on a train tells me they are pregnant, whether the bump looks like the

kind of bump a pregnant woman would have. I feel bad about that. Because every now and then a pregnant woman really does need a seat, and she is going to get, from me, a more skeptical evaluation than she would have gotten a year ago. That is, I think, the actual cost of what that woman did to me and to Denise and to Malik on that train. She made me warier. She made me a slightly less generous person. And that, in a way, was the thing the fake pregnancy took from us. So tell me honestly — was I right to hold my ground, or should I have just given her the space and avoided the fight?

* Story inspired by real-life situations. Names and details have been changed for privacy.