Martha got pregnant within weeks—her body responding to violation with pregnancy before she’d even begun to understand what had happened to her.
Martha June Sizemore gave birth on February 14, 1920, at age 12—Valentine’s Day, though no one in the mining camp acknowledged such holidays. The birth was difficult—Martha’s body was too young, too small, too undeveloped for childbearing. A midwife delivered the baby, a girl they named Rose.
Martha held Rose against her chest, this tiny person who had come from her body, and felt something fierce and protective that she’d never felt before. Martha loved Rose with desperate intensity—the kind of love that only someone who had been unloved and unprotected can give.
Martha swore silently that Rose would never be sold to an old man. Rose would never be a child bride. Rose would have the childhood Martha never got. Martha didn’t know how she’d protect Rose—she was 12 years old, married to a brutal man, living in a mining camp with no education, no money, no power. But she swore it anyway, holding her newborn daughter on Valentine’s Day, the snow still falling outside, the same beautiful snow Martha had laughed at two months earlier now just cold and white and indifferent.
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