Twenty-two months ago, my life split into before and after. Not the romantic kind of split—the kind that cracks open everything you thought was solid and leaves you standing in the rubble trying to figure out which pieces still belong to you.
My daughter needed care in ways I didn't see coming. And a year later, I walked away from a corporate career that had defined me for over two decades. Two seismic shifts in thirteen months, and I'm not gonna lie—I didn't know if I was gonna make it through.
I had my husband, who had faced his own health crisis that year. After twenty-five years of marriage, I suddenly found myself helping both him and my daughter through recovery. I had Cairo, my big-hearted Rottweiler, and Odin and Frey, my two long-haired Dachshunds, who did not care whether I had answers. They only knew when the house felt heavy, when I needed company, and when it was time to be fed. I also had the woman I had been raised to become: composed, capable, gracious under pressure, and accustomed to keeping the household and the world around her from showing their seams. For the first time, even she did not feel like enough.
I didn't start writing Lark Mesa because I had dreams of being an author. I started writing because I was drowning, and I needed something that was mine—something that had nothing to do with managing a crisis, holding things together, or being who everyone else needed me to be. I needed to prove to myself that I could still build something. That I wasn't just managing the wreckage.
These twelve books, and the twelve heroines inside them, became my way of staying present for my daughter while finding myself again. Every page was me asking: Can I do this? Can I build something? Can I believe that second chances are real?
This midlife reinvention has been one of the hardest things I've ever been through. Harder than I knew how to say out loud for a long time.
But these books—and the women in them—they saved me. They gave me permission to show up for both of us: for her, and for me.
So I built Lark Mesa. I created these women. I spent twenty-two months learning that I could do something that terrified me, and that doing it while showing up for my daughter didn't make it less meaningful. It made it matter more.
This is their story. But it's also mine.