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bought bananas and packs of crisps from the canteen on the second floor and watched her devour them without pausing for breath. Hunger replaced thirst and I was glad after the scales said she’d lost almost a stone in the preceding weeks. Her mood picked up when her appetite was satiated, then dropped when the nurse came in with the blood-testing meter. She clawed and hit us, threw and broke two devices, and called us dickheads.
    One nurse offered her a Shrek annual to look at and Rose said, ‘You must think I’m stupid – you want to stab me again!’
    Shelley gave us a colourful book on diabetes, written for children and illustrated with simplistic pictures of too-happy kids self-injecting. Rose refused to look. She asked for her dad and continued to fight every finger prick and injection, and then cried into her elbow and wouldn’t let me comfort her.
    ‘Maybe it’ll hurt less if you relax,’ I said, feeling useless.
    ‘You’re supposed to be on my side!’ she wailed. ‘You’re supposed to tell them I don’t want it and make them stop. Why don’t you?’
    What could I say?
    ‘Because you need insulin in your body now,’ I tried.
    ‘I’ll swallow it then.’ Hope made her touch my arm and let me sit closer on the bed. ‘I’ll swallow those little headache sweet things. I’ll learn how, I promise , Mum.’
    ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I explained, relieved to be physically close to my daughter again, to be able to smell the yogurt she’d just eaten, breathe in her increasingly less familiar scent. ‘When you swallow insulin it breaks down in your tummy before doing what it needs to.’ I was surprised by how much I’d taken in over the course of my diabetes tuition.
    Rose pulled from me again. She looked away to hide the fear in her eyes. But I saw it. Knew the reality that she was ill had begun to sink in. She didn’t fight or kick when the nurse did the next blood test, she merely looked away as though none of it existed, and that made me the saddest of all.
    On our penultimate day a dietitian told us about the best foods for Rose. My daughter crossed one arm and with the other drew doodles of faces with mouths downward on a card her Aunt Lily had sent. I tried to take everything in, to hear this latest lesson over the angry scratch-scratch of her pen.
    Not only was there a regimented routine of injection and finger-prick testing for us to look forward to, but Rose would have to avoid high-sugar foods and eat a portion of starch with each meal, as well as plenty of vegetables. Also we would have to maintain her sugar levels with regular snacks.
    What would Christmas be like for her this year? Jake would be home after New Year and that might help her cope. But while others indulged there would be no treats for her; there would be injections with every meal, and a blood test before going downstairs to see if Santa had been. I decided I would forgo whatever food Rose had to miss, so she wasn’t alone.

    We settled in for what the nurse said could be our last night, Rose sulky in her pink cow onesie, me in clothes I’d worn for two days. We’d be disturbed in the dark at least three times for finger-prick testing so I wanted her asleep well before nine. She let me kiss her damp forehead and tuck the covers under her still-thin body. I slid War Horse back under the pillow in case she woke as hungry again for words as she was for snacks from the trolley. Her surrender to my attentions wasn’t because she felt okay; it was resignation. Defeat. I wanted my fighter back even if that meant more battle.
    On the pull-out bed I closed my eyes, exhausted.
    ‘Tell him to stop pulling my covers,’ Rose said, half asleep.
    ‘Who?’ I asked, sitting up.
    But she’d gone, her chest falling and rising like the ocean.
    I dreamt again that I was on a boat.
    It was so small that if someone sat opposite me, our knees would have touched. My bones hurt like I’d been there a long time, and my lips cracked