I never scolded her for it.

I understood what it was.

Instead, every single morning, I quietly took the stale roll from beneath her pillow and replaced it with a fresh one, and said nothing about it, day after day after day.

It took nearly two weeks.

And then, one morning, I found the roll from the night before still under her pillow, uneaten and untouched — and beside it, that night’s dinner roll, which she had not hidden at all, but had eaten at the table like a child who was no longer afraid.

She had stopped hoarding, not because I told her to, but because her body had finally accumulated enough evidence to believe the thing I could not say to her in words: that in this house, the food would still be there tomorrow.