“There’s plenty more tomorrow, Hannah,” I said, as gently as I could manage.

“Aunt Veronica says food is only for people who earn it.”

“In this house,” I told her, and I made my voice very steady, “food is never a reward.

Food is just food.

You will always have it.

You never have to earn it, and it is never going to run out.” She looked at me as though I had said something in a language she did not speak — which, I would come to understand, was exactly the case.

My daughter had spent so long inside a world where love and food and safety were all conditional, all things that had to be earned and could be taken away, that the concept of an unconditional meal was genuinely foreign to her.