The disease lived deep in her cells, constantly mutating. Drugs and medication were food, the hospital her home. It finally vanished -hope dwelled, but like hope- a fire, it gets extinguished. 24 hours, 7 days in the hospitals rooms, the sterile and antiseptic wall clung onto her skin that even her nightmares were of the hospital.

The clawing, the screaming, the screeching of every sick individuals resounded of the walls they've now accepted to call home,maybe not.

But they all clung onto hope, but fear smothered that out like a known acquaintance feeding upon one's anger, jealousy, revenge and yet one's perseverance.

Its devious smile stood upon every shadow silhouette: on the young girl not ready to die, on the old, frail woman waiting for her husband to arrive before she's taken to a world she no longer recognizes, or even the woman who was not a patient nor sick, but has walked through every corners and vertices of within the hospital walls grieving for people she had let into her life.

Fear sat there like a known acquaintance that fed upon every sign of doubts waiting for its next victims, with his victims unaware of its presence as they stand unamazed, unfazed in the playdate arrange with it.

The silence was the first thing that frightened her. For so long, the hospital had been a symphony of alarms: the steady chirp of monitors, the squeak of rubber soles on polished floors, the distant wailing of people deep in the throes of fear. Now there was only the hush of a small flat on a Tuesday morning, a kettle ticking as it cooled, and, from the next room, the thin, determined cry of her daughter. She stood in the doorway of the nursery and did not move.

The disease had finally gone. The doctors had said the word remission as if it were glass. She had nodded and thanked them, and walked out through the same sliding doors she had once believed she would only leave in one direction. The sun had been enormous that day. When she arrived home, her skin caked in sunlight, and dismissed the sitter who had taken up the work of motherhood so graciously in her absence, that she couldn't help but hate her, her body was a house she no longer recognised. The mirror offered a stranger: hollow cheeks, hair growing back soft, skin still carrying the bruised remnants of needles. Her hands, which had once been steady, trembled when she lifted the baby.

Fear had followed her home. Of course it had. It sat at the kitchen table with its old, patient smile, a known acquaintance who had never once forgotten her address, now feeding on the small things. The cough that lasted a day too long. The tiredness that arrived at four in the afternoon. The way her daughter's forehead felt warm against her lips, and the three full minutes she spent with the thermometer, heart hammering, before it read normal.

Only a cold, she told herself. Only a cold. And fear, unbothered, simply leaned back and waited.

Her sleep was no kinder. The hospital still visited her in the dark: the antiseptic walls, the clawing and the screeching, the old woman waiting for a husband who never came. She would wake with her skin crawling and her mouth dry, and before she could draw breath, she would hear it: her daughter, small and furious and gloriously alive, demanding the world. She had always imagined strength as a roar, something loud and bright and cinematic, like a fire that refused to be put out. She had been wrong. Hope had been the fire, and fires, as she knew better than anyone, go out. Strength was a banked ember, the kind that glows beneath the ash all night so the morning has something to begin with.

There were days fear came closer than others.

One grey afternoon, her daughter spiked a fever, and the flat seemed to shrink around them. She sat in the waiting room of the children's ward, the walls the same sterile white, the smell the same sharp, clean lie. Her knees went to water. For one terrible moment she was twenty-four hours, seven days again, a body folded into a bed, a name on a chart. Across the room, an elderly woman sat alone, holding a handbag in her lap like an anchor. Their eyes met. Neither looked away. She thought of the women she had known in those corridors, the ones who had not walked out, and felt something shift inside her. Fear sat down beside her, as it always did. It smiled its devious smile. Not today, she thought, and shifted her daughter higher on her shoulder. You can sit with us. But you don't get to hold her.

The fever broke by morning.

Fear would never leave. It was too old an acquaintance for that. But she was no longer a guest at its table, unaware and unfazed, waiting to be fed upon. She had sat across from it in the dark and counted its teeth. She knew its habits now. She knew its name. And on the mornings it came calling, she would pour two cups of tea, set one before it, and say, quite calmly:

Sit if you must. I have a baby to raise.

On the first anniversary of her remission, she woke before the sun and stood at the window with her daughter on her hip. The sky was turning from bruise to peach, the way wounds heal: slowly, then all at once. Her daughter reached a chubby hand toward the light, curling and uncurling her fingers as though she could gather it.

"Look," she whispered. "That's the morning."

The disease had taken so much, but at least it had not taken this. The warm weight against her shoulder and the slow gold light on the rooftops remained.