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People often ask why my book opens with a woman walking away from the life she thought she would have. Why I chose to begin with a departure instead of a beginning. Why I started with heartbreak instead of hope.

The truth is simple:
Her story, although vastly different from mine, was born from a place I have been.

I know what it feels like to stand at the edge of a life you believed in — a life you prayed for, planned for, trusted — and realize it is no longer yours to hold. I know what it feels like to carry a child and a heartbreak at the same time. I know what it feels like to leave, not because you want to, but because staying would cost you pieces of yourself you can’t afford to lose.

I separated from my then‑husband while pregnant with our first child, after a miscarriage, after discovering he had another life filled with secrets I didn’t know existed. It was a kind of pain that rearranges you. A kind of betrayal that forces you to rebuild not just your life, but your sense of self. A kind of grief that sits in your bones.

So when I wrote my protagonist — this pregnant woman stepping into the unknown — I wasn’t writing my story. But I was writing from the emotional truth of a place I once stood.

I know the fear she carries.
I know the exhaustion.
I know the shame that doesn’t belong to her but still clings.
I know the way grief can make you feel like you’re disappearing.
I know the desperate hope of wanting to be strong for your child when you’re not sure how to be strong for yourself.

I know the quiet courage it takes to leave.
I know the louder courage it takes to rebuild.

Her journey is not my journey, but the soil she grows from is familiar. The ache is familiar. The resilience is familiar. The moment of choosing yourself — even when you’re trembling — is familiar.

I began her story with leaving because leaving is often where becoming begins.

It’s where truth rises.
It’s where identity shifts.
It’s where the old life ends and the new one hasn’t yet taken shape.
It’s where fear and hope sit side by side, both whispering different futures.

And it’s where so many women — myself included — have found the strength we didn’t know we had.

Her story is fiction.
But the heartbeat behind it is real.

And writing her has been a way of honoring the version of me who survived her own unraveling, who rebuilt her own life, who carried her child and her grief and her hope all at once.

This is why her story begins with leaving.
Because sometimes, leaving is the first act of saving yourself.

— Leigh C. Mitchell