Lily Carter had learned something about hunger long before most children ever worried about missing lunch.

Sometimes hunger wasn’t the hardest thing to carry. Sometimes it was the memories.

She tightened both hands around the old silver lunchbox as she stepped through the automatic doors of Miller’s Family Grocery on a cool autumn afternoon.

The lunchbox had once been bright blue decades earlier, but years of scratches, dents, and chipped paint had left only faded patches of color around the corners.

To everyone else, it looked like an old piece of junk.

To Lily, it was the most valuable thing she owned.

Her mother had carried it every single day when she worked at Miller’s Grocery many years before.

Now, after her mother’s passing, it was the only object Lily had left that still carried her scent, her fingerprints, and the memories of better days.

Lily wasn’t there to shop.

She didn’t even have enough money for that.

Inside the lunchbox rested a small sandwich wrapped in wax paper, a bruised apple, and something hidden beneath the metal tray that her mother had told her never to lose.