Chapter 19

My first week of motherhood was frankly a blur. When I wasn’t nursing or changing nappies, I was sleeping, healing, and experiencing the strangest dreams.

The two healers who’d been present through the birthing process kept me barely lucid with medicines they constantly poured down my throat. And every other word out of their mouths related to how much of a miracle I was. I shouldn’t have survived what I had. It wasn’t natural, wasn’t anything they’d ever seen or dealt with before. I think they expected me to drop dead again at any given moment.

They even had a wet nurse brought in to take over the care of my child. But I wouldn’t let anyone else near her. She was mine. My little Anniston Rose.

She was the most precious thing I’d ever experienced. I couldn’t stop stroking her cheek whenever she nursed...or slept...or cooed out her contentment with the world. She was what I considered to be the miracle.

I almost wept that first day when my milk didn’t immediately come, and then it f