Miracle. It’s a word that’s usually applied to someone coming back from the brink of death or religious fanfare, but occasionally it’s also used to give children an inflated sense of self importance. Amanda and David James were perfectly (mostly) nice people, a fine couple working up the ranks of their prospective fields. David, a management consultant working on a team in one of Tennessee’s top firms, met Amanda on a business endeavor that sourced her respective company’s services in corporate public relations, and the relationship that blossomed turn them into a force to be reckoned with both professionally and personally. Though career oriented and driven, Amanda, as type A as they come, needed to complete the package of success with a child.

Quite frankly, Amanda wasn’t good at not getting what she wanted. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she’d glided through life with everything she wanted being handed to her. Yes, she was a hard worker. Yes, she busted her ass professionally to get to where she was, but it was hardly a rags to riches success story. She was born into success, and finding it came rather simply, comparatively. When she wanted something, she sought it until she got it, and the pieces of her picturesque life puzzle fell into place without much coaxing. So, when she suffered her first miscarriage, the emotional atrophy she experienced in the aftermath was debilitating.

It’s an incredible loss for a woman to suffer, but for Amanda, it was also an insult. It was her own body telling her she couldn’t have what she wanted, and that was a difficult pill to swallow. They tried again. And again. And again. And the results were the same and more devastating every time, until Amanda stopped going to work at all and David tried to keep his wife together while dealing with his own losses.

You know how they say the third time’s the charm? Well, as far as Amanda and David are concerned, that’s a load of shit. Those self importance creating miracles? They happen on the fifth try if you’re a James. David had resigned to the idea of adoption, and Amanda, while not entirely against it, still felt angry at herself and her body, a misplaced blame for someone coping with something out of their control. So that’s when it happened. Number five with a bullet, Ione came into this world defying every biological odd that was against her, ready to climb to the top.

Needless to say, she was spoiled as hell. There was nothing Ione could ask for that she wouldn’t receive, with Amanda devoting every waking moment to fawning over her. The miscarriages had set her life on a different sort of trajectory, the importance of career related goals taking a backseat into non-existence as Amanda became a bonafide homemaker. She didn’t know how badly she’d wanted that until she was told she couldn’t have it, so she wasn’t taking it — or Ione — for granted.

Gymnastics, ballet, piano, anything Ione expressed interest in was treated as though they were nurturing the next child prodigy. She fell off many balance beams, she proved she had absolutely no rhythm. Sports, those were never going to be an option because Ione preferred pink tutus to grass and dirt, even if she couldn’t accomplish much in a dance studio. She started piano lessons at the age of seven, and that seemed to be something she understood, hard to master but easy enough to follow for someone who had a natural inclination toward music, even if she didn’t know it yet.

But she was in a good place for it, really, if that was something that suited her. Nashville was rife with musical culture, and when she showed interest in it, Amanda jumped at the opportunity to engross her in it. Anything she wanted, after all. So the two of them embarked on a scene that Ione would go on to fall in love with, her bones igniting with an inherent passion running through her veins. Music was something she understood, because no matter how young she was, the emotion in someone else's creation was something she could understand even if she couldn't relate to it. Young and naive, absolutely, but she knew regardless that it was something she wanted to create for herself. She asked her mother for guitar lessons, she began writing poetry and the rest — quite literally — became history.