And I knelt down beside her, so we were eye to eye.

“Yes, sweetie,” I said.

“Every single day.”

She considered this.

Then she reached in and took out a small roll, and tore it in half, and handed one piece to me, and we stood there in the kitchen and ate our bread together.

Over the following months, slowly, unevenly, the fear began to fade.

The hidden crackers and the bread under the pillow appeared less and less often.

And then came the day I knew, for certain, that she was healing: I had found her room entirely free of hidden food for a week, and she came into the kitchen carrying a hard, dry heel of bread she had discovered under a rug, a relic of her old fear, and she held it up to me.