There were others like them out in the world. Ghosts wearing human skin. Eternal souls in ephemeral bodies.

Some were evil, like Mavis and Ethel and the others, feeding off weakness and despair. They craved human blood to stave off death and extend their lives if not forever, indefinitely.

Others had cast aside their immortality to live among humans, despite humanity's flaws. Had chosen to lift them up rather than tear them down. To show them they could be more than their pasts, their petty quarrels, their selfish desires.

Martin was the first Father in a long line of Mothers.

He would teach their daughter a truth he could have only ever learned from returning home: that the world was better with a little magic in it—but eventually even magic must return to dust.

Afterword

FROM START TO finish, this book took me the longest to write.

The Midwives was the first novel I'd ever completed. I'd written dozens of false starts since I began writing in my spare time at the age of fifteen—nearly thirty years ago now—often as much as a hundred pages or more. But nothing ever came together in a way that felt like it could work as a cohesive story. It was clear I really didn't know what I was doing.

I wrote The Midwives in 2011 at the suggestion of a woman I was dating at the time and finished that first draft in about five or six months. It was pretty awful, but writing it proved I could actually finish something longer and more in-depth than a screenplay. From there, I was hooked.

I threw that first draft in a drawer—following advice from Stephen King's On Writing—and started writing what would eventually be my first published book, the horror collection, Gristle & Bone. I wrote a second novel, Salvage, which became my "first novel" upon publication. I wrote two more novels and several novellas and another collection. But every once in a while, I would think about returning to Barrows Bay and Martin and Sheila and Ruby and Aunt Norma. And of course, those mean old ladies I was certain I could make if not terrifying at least very creepy.

The initial concept came to me when I heard about the odd practice of consuming part of the placenta, and I was suddenly struck by the image of a teenage girl running in the dark, holding a newborn—running from entities that looked like sweet old ladies. Her midwives. I didn't know if it would be a short story or a screenplay or a novel. I waffled on that decision many times, as I often did back then.

In the first draft, I couldn't even keep track of the individual Midwives' names. They had no personality, no individuality. They had different physical characteristics but they all acted essentially as a single entity. Adding the rivalry between Ruby and Mavis Lynch gave the rewrite some legs the original draft lacked, a lynchpin on which the second half of the story hung. *wink*