My daughter had learned, in that house, that taking food she wanted made the people who were supposed to love her angry, and that the anger was so frightening it was better to give the food back than to face it.

That is what they had done to her, not in one night but in a hundred small ones, and the chicken leg was only the night it finally became visible.

I knelt on that kitchen floor with her small hands folded inside mine and I felt the whole weight of what I had let happen to her under my own roof, on my own watch, while I told myself I was holding a family together.

There is no holding together a family that teaches a small child to be afraid of her own hunger.