The sun had barely climbed over the highway when she found herself gripping the steering wheel of her aging sedan, her knuckles pale from how hard she was holding on, while the baby in the back seat screamed with a hunger that sounded too big for such a tiny body. The cries weren’t the soft whimpers of a fussy infant; they were sharp, raw, desperate cries, the kind that come from real need, the kind that makes your heart feel like it’s being torn open because you can’t fix it fast enough.
Lena had learned the different kinds of crying the way soldiers learn the sound of different weapons.
There was the sleepy cry, the bored cry, the “I’m wet and offended” cry.
But this one?
This was the cry that meant her daughter’s stomach was empty again.
Mila, only five months old, was at that age where she didn’t just want food—she demanded it with every ounce of her lungs, like her whole world depended on it, because to her, it did.
Lena’s eyes burned from lack of sleep. Her hair was shoved into a messy bun that had stopped being a hairstyle and started being a survival tactic. She wore the same gray hoodie she’d been wearing for days because it was the only thing that still felt like comfort, even though it smelled faintly of milk spit-up and the stale interior of her car.
And when she reached into the diaper bag beside her seat, hoping against hope that there was one more bottle, one more scoop of formula, one more anything…
She felt nothing but plastic wrappers and an empty container.
Her stomach dropped.
