The evening before we left for our recent trip to Paris, I got an out-of-the-blue (and slightly panicked) text from someone who works for a North Carolina print media company. In all the excitement of preparing for our trip, I’d forgotten Beauty in the Bittersweet was getting a short blurb in their August issue, but she was in a bind and needed a favor.

She’d lost her planned feature for that issue, and she wanted to know if I would be the cover story instead. This also meant me writing the article, which she was comfortable with because I’d written features for them before, although never about myself.

Who would have guessed that just before my 49th birthday, I’d be a Cover Girl?!

When a newlywed develops an annoying cough just months after her wedding, she doesn’t think much of it. But after weeks of worsening symptoms and treatments that aren’t helping, she reluctantly accepts that there is something seriously wrong.

But it was almost Christmas, and her new husband had been widowed due to another awful illness. She can’t imagine bringing those memories and that pain back into their home, especially during the holidays. So, she pushes through.

Then her daughter comes home and finds her barely holding on. The woman is rushed to the hospital and receives a diagnosis worse than she ever imagined. Inexplicably strange circumstances—by earthly standards—involving cardinal rules being broken result in her life being saved, but leave her comatose.

Weeks later, she emerges with the scariest and most miraculously inexplicable story of her life.

When a young receptionist in Raleigh and a businessman from her company’s Atlanta branch fall in love over the phone, their unsanctioned romance results in a baby on the way. But, alas, their relationship doesn’t survive the unplanned miracle. Then their daughter asks to meet her father eighteen years later. Will the stirred-up sparks result in a heated argument—or the old flame being fanned?