Page 33

And when he proposed with his mother’s vintage diamond ring encrusted with the most delicate tiny emeralds that perfectly matched the color of his eyes, I even cried when I said yes.

I truly believed he would never hurt me again, that it was an accident, a onetime thing.

And I still lived in fear of becoming my mother.

I was massively in debt from school and always would be unless Gray paid it all off.

I wanted a nice life. By then I felt like I deserved it and getting ahead in this world isn’t based on merit.

Gray wanted babies right away. That was fine by me.

I’d always wanted a gaggle of kids, the opposite of my solitary upbringing.

But apparently it was not fine by my body.

I couldn’t get pregnant. I took the herbs and saw the acupuncturists.

We used the apps that monitored my ovulation and the temperature of my uterus.

Every month, there was the same result. I bawled when I bled, and Gray held me and rocked me like the baby I couldn’t have.

My doctors all said to wait a year to try IVF so we did the other things.

“You’re under too much stress at work,” Gray said over and over again. He wasn’t wrong.

Each time my body failed I became more and more obsessed with trying to fix it. I was prediabetic, the doctor told me. My blood pressure and cholesterol were both high. My aura was off, a holistic specialist insisted.

When the lease on the bakery came up for renewal, we decided to let it go.

I mourned, but I was also possessed with fixing whatever was broken in my body.

I wouldn’t work myself to death like Mom had.

The desire to have a child took over my every waking moment and somehow I let my previous dream slip away.

When Gray’s dad had that stroke and turned the farm over to him, it all seemed perfect and simple and easy.

Our life out there would be beautiful and much simpler. We’d eat food grown on our land. Nothing processed. No chemicals and additives. My aura would heal.

I doubled down again on every possible noninvasive fertility treatment—pills, injections, acupuncture.

Gray said we needed to pray, that prayer would fix whatever was wrong with me.

We attended virtual prayer groups twice a week since we were so far out in the country, but we made the long drive into the city a couple of times a month to be with the congregation in person.

I loved the community of it, the camaraderie.

This is what had been missing from my childhood, a village to care for us, to support us and help us.

So what if I didn’t believe in God, if I could never truly believe; I wanted all of the other parts of it so badly that it didn’t matter.

When everyone placed their hands gently on my belly and told me I was in their nightly prayers I thanked them profusely.

I saw a new doctor out there, Dr. Carmichael. He was the man who had delivered Gray and he told me that it took my husband’s mother more than a year to get pregnant with her first baby too.

“What you’re going through is normal,” he assured me. “And we are going to heal you.” I asked about IVF.

“Not necessary,” he insisted. “Artificial fecundation is a sin.”

I didn’t believe that was true, but I didn’t push it.

He promised me I would be pregnant soon.

I felt so safe, so protected, so cared for.

Gray doubled down on making sure I had everything I needed and eventually it all worked exactly the way everyone had promised it would.

Who is to say what did the trick: the fertility treatments, the intrauterine insemination, the acupuncture, the lack of stress, or the constant prayer.

I didn’t care. Six months later I was pregnant, and I stayed pregnant.

I know a lot of women who wouldn’t agree, but I adored pregnancy.

I felt whole for the first time in my life.

Alice was perfect and delicious and my everything.

We stayed in bed together for entire days when Gray would travel for work, and it was the happiest I’d ever been.

Everything I had been through, everything I had endured, was for her.

I was so grateful to finally be a mother that I threw myself into it with the same furious intensity I had with my bakery.

I made baby food from scratch. I sewed her little dresses.

I rid our house of every possible toxin.

I was a good mother. I was finally good.

It was Alice who found me after Gray came at me again, when he hit me so hard I passed out on the floor of our bathroom. I’d been unconscious for hours. That’s when I saw the bruises on the top of her arm, thick purple lines made by a man’s hand.

My sweet gangly colt of a daughter fetched me warm washcloths and wiped the blood from my face while I lay on the bathroom floor. I reached up to touch her arm.

“He grabbed me when I walked into the barn and startled him.” She said it so simply. So resigned. I hated that she was resigned to his violence. But it turns out she wasn’t.

“It will never happen again,” I managed.

“No, it won’t,” she said. Only twelve and so wise. “It will not happen again.”

“Where are the others?”

“Willow is here. Downstairs. The others are out in the fields with Kiki. I told everyone you’re working.”

I hated that she was lying for me.

It had to end. But I already knew that. Plans had already been made to get us all out from under his grip, but I worried it wouldn’t be enough. I needed more help to be able to end things once and for all.