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To Kayla, child of hts who’ve yet to shine when this ritten

Grafting and budding involve joining two separate plants so that they function as one, creating a strong, healthy plant that has only the best characteristics as its two parents

AMERICAN HORTICULTURE SOCIETY PLANT PROPAGATION

Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother’s secret hope outlives them all

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Memphis

January 1893

SHE WAS DESPERATE, destitute, and demented

Once she’d been a beautiful wo a her body to seduce and her mind to calculate She became the mistress of one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Tennessee

Her house had been a showplace, decorated at her whiinald’s , a wardrobe to rival thefriends, a carriage of her own

She’d given gay parties She’d been envied and desired

She, the daughter of a biddable housemaid, had all her avaricious heart had desired

She’d had a son

It had changed her, that life she hadn’t wanted to carry inside her It had beco she loved more than herself She planned for her son, drea in her womb

She delivered him into the world with pain, such pain, but with joy, too The joy of knohen the pain was done, she would hold her precious son in her arms