Because that one chocolate bar, left in the open, meant that my daughter was finally beginning to believe the impossible thing I had promised her in a restaurant weeks before: that there would be food tomorrow.

I want to linger on the food-hoarding, because it taught me something profound about how trauma lives in the body, and about the true nature of recovery, that I had not understood before.

When I first found the food hidden under Maya’s bed, my instinct, the provider’s instinct, was to reassure her with words: to explain, patiently, that the refrigerator was full, that money was no longer a problem, that she was safe now, that hoarding was unnecessary.

As though the hiding were a mistaken belief that could be corrected with better information.