My six-year-old nephew crawled seven blocks carrying his little sister—then doctors and police uncovered why my brother’s children had vanished from my life for three years
I understood then that this wasn’t a child talking about a snack. This was a child who had constructed an entire architecture of contingency around scarcity, who had been planning for the version of tomorrow where the food was gone because that version had happened before.
“There will be food tomorrow,” I said. “And the day after.”
